Greg Mottola

“I kind of thought I would only work exclusively in the world of naturalistic comedy drama, but there is this side of me that also loves Hollywood, and I wanted to see what that felt like.”

“I'm not someone who's gone to Comic Con as a devotee.”

“I can't seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn't work.”

“I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.”

“'Sugarland Express' is a movie that I really loved and watched a lot.”

“When you're a young person, the solace one can get from popular music is something I just have tremendous nostalgia for, affection for. I still have it.”

“It's like I'm thin skinned, I guess, but I thought I could never write about my youth for the longest time. It took getting to my forties before I could even look back on it.”

“I'd like to think I have a strange affinity for the embarrassing. Not sure what that says about me. But I like the awkward, uncomfortable comedy.”

“Having grown up in a Catholic family, while I felt like I was never conscious of any blatant anti-Semitism, I was aware of a slightly insidious, us-versus-them mentality. A lot of my best friends and early girlfriends were Jewish, and I encountered what was more of a suburban small-mindedness, of people needing to defend their tribe.”

“In indies, life is very dark and realistic, and in mainstream films, the edges are all rounded off and very sentimentalized.”

“'Duel' is one of the greatest suspense films of all time.”

“I have alopecia. My hair fell out when I was in college and I didn't take it so well.”

“I think I am attracted to that time in life when your worldview is still forming in small ways.”

“The joke is that no matter how much we think we can evolve, we'll never escape our limitations.”

“I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school - I have no romance with computer work. There's no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.”

“I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.”

“I have scripts that I've only shown to animals... and they passed on them.”

“I'm the most awkward man alive.”

“I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'”

“For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.”