The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Elvis Mitchell

Written Version Ten

When you're trying to sustain a high level of intensity and panic, sometimes it actually helps to have something happen that makes you really afraid because even if in real life it wouldn't make you that scared, to take that little bit of fear and be melodramatic about it, I guess, and convince yourself that it's worse, can be effective.

Alexandra Daddario

Time Life Fear

My dad was obviously a really quirky, unconventional Asian man who didn't care about what other people thought. When he would fight with my mom, he would be really dramatic. He would be like, 'Devil, get away, for I am God's property.' He would say crazy things that were so melodramatic but so theatrical and funny.

Ali Wong

Mom God Funny

For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.

Andrew Sean Greer

Time Men Cool

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.

Andy Serkis

You Wrong Wit

All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.

Baz Luhrmann

Good You Vices

I don't think 'Twilight' should be approached like 'Batman.' Because it is an invented kind of world, especially this one, I think it's got to be done with a sense of enjoyment to it I guess more than anything. So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It's a melodrama.

Bill Condon

Men World Wit

In Korean films there is only really a strong tradition of melodramas.

Bong Joon-ho

Tradition T Strong

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.

Camille Paglia

Men Art Would

It's interesting - I always thought when I was doing more melodramatic stuff like 'Everwood' that the directors were constantly reeling me in and stopping me from being funny.

Chris Pratt

Funny Wood Woo

The thing about romance and romantic movies is that they can be somewhat melodramatic. For a lot of actors, there's a certain cringe factor that's involved with that.

David Lyons

Romantic Movies Wit

I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.

David Sedaris

War Time Writing

I love 'Glee.' I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it okay to cry.

David Sedaris

War Time Love

The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.

Deepak Chopra

Time Experience Age

I was supposed to see Lorde on the 'Melodrama' Tour in New York with my best friend, but then I got a callback for 'Booksmart' in L.A. and couldn't make the concert. Thank God I got the part!

Diana Silvers

God Art York

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

Douglas Sirk

Art Were UN

I'm developing some high-frame-rate 3-D processes that are going to be, I hope, indistiguishable from reality. This will be quite an unusual cinematic event - you don't just tell an ordinary story, it's more of a first-person experience where the melodrama doesn't get in the way. Being inside the movie rather than looking at the movie.

Douglas Trumbull

Hope Experience You

I work intentionally to try and make dense, complex things. We can move between genres and forms, from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture to something that looks like an informercial to something that looks like a cinematic melodrama.

Elizabeth Price

Work Power Try

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'

Elvis Mitchell

Movies Love Yearning

The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Elvis Mitchell

Written Version Ten

I was known as a ballad singer who sang melodramatic heavily produced ballads. I'm not known as a mid-tempo singer who does fun songs. I'm not going to do a song like 'Dancing on the Ceiling.'

Eric Carmen

Who UN T

Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

George C. Wolfe

A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.

George C. Wolfe

Somehow, when the authoritarians on the Right search for icons of manly warrior power to venerate, they find only those who like to melodramatically play-act as such, but who ran away when it came time to actually perform.

Glenn Greenwald

We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top.

Graham Moore

I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.

Guillermo del Toro

There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.

Guillermo del Toro

You could argue that 'Sweeney Todd' was romantic, if you looked closely at it, but it didn't impart that to its audiences. But it's large, and it's melodramatic, and it's a style I like to work in periodically.

Harold Prince

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

Harold Prince

Parsi theater was known for melodrama.

Irrfan Khan

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

Irving Babbitt

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

Jack Nicholson

If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.

Jaime Winstone

Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.

James Gray

Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.

James Gray

It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.

James Gray

I've kind of always had this balance between genre and personal dramas. It almost feels like the two help each other. If I was just to make a genre film, maybe it would be hollow and soulless. If I was just to make a personal drama, maybe it would be melodramatic and nobody would ever go see it.

Jeff Nichols

I can say without melodrama or malice that Hollywood ruined my life.

Jerome Charyn

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

Jesse Kellerman

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

Joyce Maynard

Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.

Kenneth Lonergan

I can remember when I was 24, and I broke up with my first serious girlfriend for the first time. She was a very nice person, but she had a little bit of a tendency toward melodrama... Her response was to take the key to my apartment off of her key chain and hand it back to me.

Kenneth Lonergan

I barely watch TV apart from the news. Most of it is rubbish. There's all this reality nonsense and dross. I think there's a market for a well-produced, well-written melodrama like 'Dallas.' It's pure entertainment.

Larry Hagman

I think, as directors, they may recognize, more than the rest of the body of filmmakers, exactly what you do as a director, because I think sometimes the conception is if the camera isn't swinging around, and it's not pyrotechnic or worthily melodramatic, then the direction is uninvolved.

Lenny Abrahamson

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Lillian Hellman

Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it's fair to say 'Watchmen' stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.

Lydia Millet

'Somewhere in Time' is in the top-five cheesiest movies ever made. It's super melodrama.

Mark Duplass

Ever since I worked on 'Buffy', it's always helped me to find a genre container for something, and I was like, 'Oh, this is where the movie melodrama has gone to. It's gone to YA.'

Marti Noxon

For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.

Matt Taibbi

It's a daily struggle for me to stay alive. I don't mean to be melodramatic, hyperbolic, or go into my broadcast mode. But even that, my career is bipolar.

Mauro Ranallo