Matt Reeves Quotations

When you think of the 'Exorcist,' you think of Linda Blair and pea soup and all this madness, but really if you look at the first half of that film, the stuff between her and Ellen Burstyn is so naturalistic and so real.

When we were all kids, there was one particular trailer that I think we can all remember. That was the trailer for 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' There was an amazing teaser trailer with all this weird kind of documentary footage. We were like, 'What was that! I've got to see that! What the hell was that?'

I discovered the fun of genre is... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a personal film under the guise of great fun romp.

I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.

I thought this was the most incredible opportunity. Because 'Planet Of The Apes,' aside from the fantasy element of talking apes, is such an amazing franchise, because under the surface of that genre, you're actually looking at human nature.

I remember watching the Blu-ray, and also when they first released it on DVD in the collection of all three movies of 'The Godfather,' and seeing all of those scenes that they cut out, and there wasn't a single one of them that I wished they had kept it, but they were the most exciting thing to watch anyway.

Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan.

I was obsessed with movies, and it ended up being the tool with which I could make friends. Because I was too painfully shy in other circumstances, I would say, 'Hey, do you want to make a movie?' And that's how I made friends, and it was also my escape.

I wanted to explore the possibility that this could have become 'Planet of the Humans and the Apes' instead of just 'Planet of the Apes,' so I wanted there to be this hope of connection as well as this inexorable pull towards what we know the series becomes.

People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.

As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because you're trying to create an identity, and you're feeling shameful about the one that you're making.

'Avatar' was incredible and totally groundbreaking, but it wasn't about utter realism. It had a great mythic fantasy to it, but the characters don't seem totally photo-real, as amazing as they are.

It's the idea that anticipation is as scary as anything in a movie could be. People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.

It's funny, people don't think of 'Cloverfield' as being restrained because it's a handycam movie, but the only reason it's a handycam movie is because that was supposed to be the reality of the situation.

It's crazy when you think about the 'Apes' franchise and how dark all of the endings are and how dark the movies are, and yet there's something very pleasurable about these movies. It really comes down to the potency of this idea, of seeing intelligent apes.

There's tremendous shame with being bullied. I think there's a level at which you think that there's a reason that you're being singled out, that you're being chosen.

I'm a first-time father, and it was amazing to me to learn that my son could actually use sign language before the spoken word. I could see this intelligence in his eyes before he could speak: how he could understand what was going on around him and was frustrated by that.

In a weird way, if you look at all the 'Apes' movies, they all seem like different stories in the same universe. 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' is definitely a continuation, but the other ones jump all around chronologically.

I think there's a level at which you think that there's a reason that you're being singled out, that you're being chosen. As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because you're trying to create an identity, and you're feeling shameful about the one that you're making. So, I identified with it a lot.

There's something about seeing a movie that you like, and being able to see the scenes that didn't make it, just as a window into the process of how choices are made and how a movie is made. To me, the idea of getting to have the scenes on the DVD is very exciting.

It's that we're experiencing emotion through photo-real apes, and that's really holding a mirror up to who we are. It's interesting, because as we're showing the movie now, we're getting a lot of response about things [people] think are very topical. And the intention is never to approach it from the outside-in, which is to say, "Ah, this is going on, let's draw that in."

There's a thing when you're always working on something you really love, and this one we loved so much, it feels like you have a secret, and you can't wait to let people in on the secret. But at the same time, there's that moment where, "What if they get the secret and they think the secret is stupid?!"

Of course you're nervous, but we're really excited to be able to share what we're going to share. And it's cool, because what we're going to be doing, I think for fans especially, we think is really cool, because part of the process that most people don't ever get to see [is] that before these movies are movies starring photo-real apes, they're movies starring the image of Andy Serkis and the other actors, who are playing apes.

That movie [War for the Planet of the Apes] is incredibly engaging; it's what drives the emotion of all these films. So tonight, we're going to show a long sequence that's actually going to be.

One of the things I thought coming into the franchise, what I thought was a unique gift: you hear so much of these reboots, remakes, re-whatevers, and the thing about them is that a lot of them are retellings.

What I thought was so great about Rise [of the Planet of the Apes ] was that it wasn't a retelling; it was an entering of the universe at a different point. So it's Planet of the Apes. We already know the ending. There's no mystery in that! It becomes Planet of the Apes. So it's not about what is at the end; it's about how did we get there? And that enabled something that was totally fresh, which was an ape-point-of-view movie.

That was one of the key things - when you asked the story about the writing of the story - one of the things we wanted to make sure was that it grew out of.

I think the fun thing about this franchise [Planet of Apes], as storytellers, is that a lot of the franchises are very black and white. This is all about the gray areas; it's really about the nature.

My main interest in being a director, and the most important thing to me, is that world with the actors.

I never would have guessed I would be making science fiction and horror films.

When you think of the Exorcist, you think of Linda Blair and pea soup and all this madness, but really if you look at the first half of that film, the stuff between her and Ellen Burstyn is so naturalistic and so real.