James Gunn Quotes

But if you, as an independent filmmaker or a "serious" filmmaker, think you put more love into your characters than the Russo Brothers do Captain America, or Joss Whedon does the Hulk, or I do a talking raccoon, you are simply mistaken.

The zombie is in a lot of ways the perfect horror movie bad guy. It plays on so many fears all at once. The fear of predators, the fear of disease and the fear of loved ones betraying us - the ones we care about are turning around and trying to eat us.

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.

I think whatever is going on with my brain, I'm very, very - and I'm not saying this as a positive thing, it's just a fact - I'm very creative. I have a very strong imagination, and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant.

The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.

One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.

Thinking that everything is going to come together in a perfect way is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.

God giving man life and taking it away is not nearly so bad as God taking away childhood and giving him life.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

I don't really like movies that are all one or the other. It's really about the play between both of them. Now that I've said that, there's actually lots of movies that I like that are one or the other but it's just not for me as a filmmaker.

I like to plan everything out and know exactly what we're doing. It's always important to me to work with a cast and a crew that not only I respect their talent but I really like them as people.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

The people who gave up their humanity to save their planet was always very interesting to me.

In science fiction a fantastic event or development is considered rationally.

Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.

When people go to the theater, people say they want something different, but what they really want is something the same with slight permutations. To really not know what is going to happen next is a hard thing.

I really like people who can do both drama and comedy and not some like middle of the road do both drama and comedy. I'm not talking about some guy who does these bland dramedies all the time. I'm talking about people that have done heavy drama and who have done heavy comedy.

I don't really think in terms of competing with myself.

We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything.

It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.

What is my intention being a filmmaker? To make as much money as possible, or get as much attention as possible? It's not really either of those things. Now I can tell the stories that I want to tell.

I love Groot so much I get teary eyed when I think of him sometimes. Essentially, all the Guardians start out the movie as bastards - except Groot. He’s an innocent. He’s a hundred percent deadly and a hundred percent sweet. He’s caught up in Rocket’s life, really.

I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again.

It's definitely not the character who it is in the comics, I'll say that much.

My brain has always been wired in such a way that I'd rather communicate to a smaller audience who really get turned on by what I do than meet a wider audience and give them milk.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.