Walter Parkes Quotations

A lot of stars come to this very quickly, at a young age,

In the original book, Mark's character was just a guy who rented that apartment and encountered the spirit,

What's more, he's had to reckon with some ultimate questions, which he's done with courage and wit and irony.

We happen to have a 13-year-old son. We see him and three of his friends on a Saturday night having a perfectly great time, socially and in every other way, with a rented video game from Blockbuster. If there's not a movie that will insist their attention be taken, that will grab them passionately, they can choose to do that. Does this say something about the audience base?

Only five or six years ago, it would really take until the Wednesday after opening to sense what word-of-mouth was, ... Now, with cell phones and instant messaging, they tell each other immediately. In a time of extraordinary noise, when there are so many different messages being sent to you, vying for your attention, nothing is more important than one person you know saying, 'I saw a movie and it's fantastic.'

Often times, finding a serious idea that can be the foundation of a romantic comedy can be the difference between something that flies off like so many spinning plates or something that has some emotional weight underneath it. It also leads to the kind of actor that you can get for that role. What is often the case in a standard romantic comedy is that it's all about the-girl-and-the-boy-is-kind-of-fun vibe, but with this, you could go for an actor of real depth.

The one thing you can take out of an experience like ('The Island') is, hopefully, some wisdom, ... We've talked about it conceptually, the decision to make the movie, how we cast the movie, how we've marketed the movie. There are things to learn on all fronts. But there's not just a formula that works every time. We will learn things from it, but we might go blindly into something similar in the future.

The great irony of the summer is the audiences we all court during the summer are the ones who have the most distractions. I happen to have a 13-year-old son. I see if there isn't a good movie playing, he's happy to rent a video game and have four friends over. A movie must have a strong appeal.