I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.
John Lee Hancock
I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.
Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.
Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.
Every generation comes upon the movie again, and then, invariably, the books have a spike in sales because people want to read more about Mary Poppins.
'Snow White and the Huntsman' was - I came in before they started shooting and basically worked on Charlize Theron's character for the most part. I guess I probably worked four or five weeks on that one and stayed during production a little bit with them.
If America had a motto, it would be pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work harder than the next guy, have a goal and achieve it.
We did not go to that many movies in a theater in the little town I grew up in.
I think that, anybody with a strong will to tell a story, then that is fantastic. I think it's fantastic. I think sometimes people have what I'll call an ulterior motive with a story.
I grew up in Texas City, Texas. I didn't know anybody who was a director or whose parents or grandparents were directors. I met somebody from a nearby town one time whose father had been to the moon - it was far more likely to be an astronaut than it was to be a writer or a director.
I like some time away to recharge the batteries, not only physically but emotionally, so that I get to the point where I'm just dying to direct again, and then that's the right time to do it again.
Many years ago, I was a producer on a movie called 'My Dog Skip.' Willie Morris, the great southern writer, had written the book. We had adapted it and taken 17 years of his life and compressed it into one year.
You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved, because the movie is almost always bad when you do that. Your job No. 1 is for it to be entertaining, and if it's inspiring, that is great, too.
We have the word 'Mc' attached to so many things now, like 'McMansions.' It's become part of our vernacular as something on steroids almost, just bigger and bigger. I think, to a degree, studios have fallen prey to that as well.
A good deed is a good deed.
I just hope, every now and then, the studios still slip one of my movies in.
We felt a responsibility to the McDonald brothers and to Ray Kroc to be as factual as possible. We didn't have a responsibility to make anyone look good or anybody look bad, just to try our best to be honest.
I really don't storyboard unless it's an action sequence of some kind, but I plan carefully.
I remember going to McDonald's for the first time probably when I was in college. And then I remember going and visiting a friend in Wyoming, and he said, 'We're going to do something special. We're going to McDonald's.'
Somebody might say that they always wanted to be a fly-fishing guide in Montana and maybe they'll never get to do that but just by the virtue of having said it out loud, I think there's some power in that.
Whenever a film has three different release dates, people understandably assume that there must be something wrong with it.
I didn't know the books and certainly didn't know the tragic origin story of Mary Poppins in 1906 Australia.
Don't worry about the little factual details. Get to the heart of it.
Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. That's also what happens in almost every movie - someone is going to win and someone is going to lose.
I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.
You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.
When you are older, you want to be around people you admire, even in their personal lives.
'The Blind Side' took forever to get it out of 20th Century Fox in turnaround. It was one of three different movies I was involved with then. 'The Blind Side' just happened to be the one that got made.
You pick a project. You think, 'I can succeed at this. I can help them. I can make it so that they'll want to call me again the next time.'
Christian audiences, I think, have grown very tired of movies that try to pander to them.
It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.
I've never read a script in which you are actively pulling for the protagonist in the beginning, but little by little, you lose that.
How many superhero movies can we have? It seems like there are 19 a week. They're making money, though, and people are going to see them. So, I get it. I understand completely.
A corporation that is publicly traded, it has one goal: to make money. It doesn't have a soul. If it does have a soul, it comes from the people who run it.
Any time you have people of different races in a movie that's about America, there's going to be a racial component.
For every one that gets made, there are five other movies that you try to get made that you don't.
