Top 45 Jon Watts Quotes

What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it’s just what’s inside of that frame. It’s going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that’s my focus.

When we were kids, we would just go walking: just walk in a direction and hope that you were gonna find a crashed alien spaceship or buried pirate’s treasure or something like that. You never did. You’d find, like, a coyote skeleton, something like that. That was the most exciting thing you’d ever find.

Talking to someone you have a crush on is as scary as fighting a super-villain.

I think it helps if you have a clear vision of what you want.

By having Spider-Man exist in the same universe as the Guardians of the Galaxy… C’mon, that opens up so many possibilities!

It’s just this feeling of when you’re a kid, you have these ideas about the world and about people in your life that don’t always hold up as you get older and start to realise that things are more complex than you might’ve realised. That’s always a big part of a coming-of-age story.

We always talked about the sequel to ‘Clown’ being called ‘Clowns,’ like an ‘Alien’/’Aliens’ sorta thing, where you have multiple clowns. And just really make it, in the way that ‘Aliens’ was an action movie, do the same thing. Action-horror. That would be great.

Since being at Marvel, I’ve been watching everything over and over and over again, all the movies, and seeing how all the movies connect has been very satisfying for me.

It doesn’t matter whose idea it is or where it came from or when it arrived in the process. The best idea is the best idea no matter what.

I’d been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming.’

People know the broad strokes of what it’s like to be Spider-Man, but I wanted to really get into the details.

When you’re getting to do what you want to do, you just assume you’re going to hit a point where someone is like, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Strangely, that never happened.

There’s so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.

Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you’re playing with time, and you don’t have that ability where someone can pause at home. That’s such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don’t really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.

When you’re writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you’re going to do. You don’t have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.

On an independent film where you’re working with just a handful of people, you don’t have to explain anything because no one cares. You can do whatever you want. There’s no one there to tell you not to do it.

There’s this great panel – I forget what the actual comic is – of Spider-Man in the rain holding an umbrella and eating some Chinese takeout. It’s like, that’s the essence of ‘Spider-Man.’

‘The Onion’ is an amazing place to work because it’s a bunch of really smart, collaborative writers who aren’t afraid to try crazy things.

Big movie or small movie, you make this thing, and then you show it to people, and you just hope they like it. You hope it works.

I love the movies. Everyone always says the same thing about the shared cultural experience, seeing things on the big screen, the church of the cinema… But on top of all that, as a filmmaker, I love having people be trapped in a movie theater, forcing them to watch what I made.

I only realized I could potentially make movies after seeing ‘Ed Wood.’

I’ve always pre-vized my movies, just on my own. Even when it was, like, zero-budget things, I used this programme to do storyboards because I can’t draw that well.

‘Clown’ started as a fake trailer for a nonexistent movie.

Every film you see in film school takes on a heightened importance in your life.

There are so many great John Hughes movies covering so many different genres. You can pull so much from him.

I liked writing with my friends and making our own little stories. Making a movie like ‘Spider-Man’ never even crossed my mind.

If you think about it, now that Spider-Man is in the Marvel universe, that means that Peter Parker was probably, like, eight years old when he saw Tony on TV telling the world he’s Iron Man. And when you start thinking about it as a whole world like that, it gets really fascinating.

The movie I made with my friends in my hometown based on a dream becomes a stepping stone to ‘Spider-Man.’ I wish I could say this was an amazing, calculated path but… It’s so weird.

I’ve always been a very collaborative person, and I think ‘Cop Car’ and all the people I worked with who made it possible is a good example of that.

I was going to be a chemical engineer – I was a science nerd – that was the plan. I secretly applied to USC and NYU and got a scholarship to go to NYU based on a dumb animated short I made. It was a huge shock to me and my family.

That’s why people love Spider-Man: he’s the most grounded, relatable of superheroes.

Something I learned early on in my career is there’s no use trying to fool anybody about what you want to do on a project where there are other people involved, rather than your own thing.

Sundance is like a genre.

What’s nice about having kids close to the age they’re playing is that you can actually capture awkwardness.

I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I’m afraid we’re going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I’ve had that dream a long time.

If Spider-Man is your ground level superhero, I wanted to come up with a ground-level villain. I wanted to figure out if I could turn a regular guy into a super-villain.

To me, the best comedies get a little dark, and the best thrillers are a little bit funny. So I’m not exactly sure where I draw the line between the two.

For me, there’s a deeper genre appreciation for what a coming of age story can be about. To apply that to a superhero world, for me, that was very exciting.

I feel like what we’ve done in ‘Homecoming’ is really scratching the surface with Spider-Man.

I think it would be great to have more female directors making huge-budget movies.

You go to the movies to be transported. That’s the responsibility of filmmakers and the people that hire the filmmakers – to try and find new dreams we can all share together.

It’s really cool to do, like, a ‘Harry Potter’ evolution because you can really take your time with the character development: really, like, don’t rush past the implications of great power and great responsibility.

I didn’t even think anyone would want to make ‘Cop Car,’ and then I didn’t think anyone would want to distribute ‘Cop Car,’ and then I didn’t think anyone would want to see ‘Cop Car.’

I wouldn’t say that I was a Spider-Man super fan.

I loved the idea of Spider-Man as a kid, and I loved the Todd MacFarlane run in the 1990s, and the first Raimi movies were released when I was in film school. Those were big.