Dennis Muren Quotations

I've done enough of this that I can tell early on if it's going in the wrong direction or not.

And I also trust that there's more than one way to do something.

Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.

But you don't hire Ang Lee to do a typical children's movie. But it's such an interesting combination, whoever thought of getting Ang together with a comic book, that was just great.

Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before.

Other times you can get showy for three minutes, and that's OK with certain films. But that isn't right with an Ang Lee movie, you have to fit right in. You have to understand Ang, respect him and be part of the team and not be in charge of it - he is in charge of it.

What you want to do is, you want to get away from people being afraid to show their work, which is the first thing, because they don't want to be shot down.

I think you've got to talk to the director, see the director's films and recognise that it's important that the work fits right in and see if as part of the movie.

You know a lot of what worked on this was taken from Harry Potter 2, the little Doby character, we had a lot of our skin stuff worked out and that helped a lot. We have a lot of exchange happening.

Steven and I have worked together a lot and I'm far ahead of the curve than most people in knowing what he wants, but he knows far more than I know about what's important for the story. So, most of the changes he will make will involve story changes.