Top 30 Joe Carnahan Quotes

I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.

It’s like I don’t have any one genre, I guess. I think you’d be hard-pressed to get me into a rom-com, but who knows?

You can’t stand at the Bellagio and watch these seven story fountains and not go, ‘That’s something of extraordinary man-made beauty.’

On ‘State of Affairs,’ we’re going after some names that you wouldn’t think would traditionally do TV. A show that shoots in Los Angeles is such a rare bird in hand that I think we’re gonna have the pick of the litter.

With ‘The A-Team,’ it was like, ‘Alright, I’m going to do a big popcorn movie and see how that feels.’

‘The A-Team’ compared to making ‘Narc’ was a breeze. There’s a whole other skill set and whole other kind of bone structure that goes into making a movie like ‘Narc’ versus ‘The A-Team.’

I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing that feeling I had on ‘The Grey,’ because I think we’re all aware that, first and foremost, we were having an adventure, and we were also making this movie at the same time.

I always thought that as much as I love ‘White Jazz,’ it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic… that’s what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

I look at Las Vegas, and I see the absolute best of what we are as Americans, and I see the absolute worst, in the same city.

I love the ambiguous kind of endings. I think, oftentimes, that’s what life really is – there’s no concrete path for you to take. It’s always kind of a jumble of variables. Behind this door could be a beautiful woman, and behind the same door could be a tiger, you know? You don’t know.

If ‘The Blacklist’ taught me anything, it was kind of open-ended intrigue and leaving questions unanswered. Creating this kind of mystery by virtue of depriving the audience of these easy answers was what I was kind of into.

If I can do a romantic comedy with women, that’s Everest to me.

In TV, you can carve out a beautiful little niche like ‘Breaking Bad‘ did. Like ‘The Wire‘ did. Like ‘Homeland‘ did.

There’s a duality of a guy calling on God: ‘Where are you when I need you?’ and then, at the same time, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ I think that contradiction does exist in all of us, those of faith and those who profess to have no faith.

I obviously love ‘The Grey’; that was a pleasure to make. It was also very difficult. Listen, I love ‘Smokin’ Aces.’ That was a lot of fun to make. Completely different part of your brain, I guess. Some would argue the part that they don’t want you to use.

To me, the bones of ‘Smokin’ Aces’ is in the Coen brothers. ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘Raising Arizona.’ Those two movies, if you look at them, that’s where a lot of that comes from.

Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I’m not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.

‘Killing Pablo’ to me – as much as I love ‘The Grey”s script – ‘Killing Pablo’ to me is the best thing I’ve ever written.

I don’t conduct my career for when I’m dead and people say nice things about me. I conduct my career for the here and now, and what excites me, and what interests me.

Think about a guy like Bob Mitchum, with his kind of chest gut not defining itself one way or the other. Was there anybody tougher? Lee Marvin was a marine sniper during the Second World War. They had this sense of themselves, and they had this product of being a man in a masculine way.

I don’t know if I’m the most religious guy, but I think I’m a spiritual man, and these are the things I think about a lot. In terms of the film, I think ‘The Grey’ is very much a non-denominational kind of film. I don’t think it’s something that relies on a particular religious bent to tell the story.

To me, still my favorite 3D film is ‘Dial M for Murder.’ I thought that was great. Hitchcock used it, could put you in the room, which I thought was fantastic, but I’m still not a devotee of 3D.

To be honest, most of the time you leave the theater, and you’re like, ‘Well, that was nice, but where did I park?’ It doesn’t really stick with you.

Be open-minded and available to everything and not just saying it’s Jesus Christ or bust. So much of the world will do that. I find it troubling… Don’t be dogmatic.

There’s a vast difference between marketing a movie and the movie itself. You try to cast as wide and broad a net as possible.

I did a pilot for Fox years ago called ‘Faceless,’ with Sean Bean. I always thought it was such a cool show because it was really raw. I thought we were pushing it. This was back at a time before there was the ‘cable standard.’

‘Raising Arizona’ is maybe my favorite comedy of all time. What’s great about it is that as slapstick as it gets, it has great moments of emotion and caring. Them bringing the baby back and Trey Wilson‘s character. I love that, man.

As much as I love Antonioni films, I love the Three Stooges.

I was not a gigantic fan of ‘The A-Team’ as a kid. I was a huge ‘Miami Vice‘ fan. So for me, not necessarily to say that I put a ‘Miami Vice’ish spin on ‘The A-Team,’ but for me, what I was most intrigued by was this notion of these four guys, these four kind of special operators.

There’s a film that I wrote that I want to do called ‘The Grey,’ which is about a group of pipeline workers in Alaska flying back into civilization after being remote for a number of months. The 737 they’re on goes down, and they begin to be hunted by a pack of rogue wolves.