Scott Rudin

“That's my goal, to feel like I've done the best I could. When I've done that, anything else that happens is a bonus.”

“If you're going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you've got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you're living in.”

“I've done a lot of movies based on real people, real situations, non-fiction books, magazine articles, life rights.”

“I think you have a responsibility to the people you're making movies with, and I take that very seriously. I don't want to let up and I don't want to let down.”

“I want to make serious work that engages with serious subjects. I'm very lucky: I get to more or less make what I want.”

“I love stories about women, and I think stories about women are generally pretty underrepresented.”

“The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story.”

“Anybody who understands how a movie gets made understands that a deep-pockets player is not going to make a movie that has anything defamatory in it without protections.”

“Success is extremely ephemeral and very hard to hold onto.”

“I loved doing casting because I love actors, and I am very conscious of what actors do. But I always wanted to be a producer.”

“You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you're trying to do. A lot of it, when you're casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.”

“You always feel the ground rumbling beneath your feet, and if you don't, you're an idiot. Mostly because it is rumbling beneath your feet, and there is always someone who is coming up behind you who is as good, younger, and, at least as you perceive it, has more energy and more nimbleness than you.”

“You want reviews to come the week the movie's opening and not a month before when they do you absolutely no good.”