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" My first real television-watching experience was when I watched 'L.A. Law,' like, at 10 o'clock Thursday nights with my parents. They would let me stay up late. "

Jonathan Levine

Parents

Real

Experience

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" To me, using music is creating a shorthand with an audience. And I love music so much. "

Jonathan Levine

Love

Music

" I really don't like when you see improv scenes go on too long. It really bothers me, even if the jokes are good. "

" I think people will always want to go see a movie, whether it's a comedy and you want to see it and laugh with people, or whatever. "

" I like to branch out as much as I can, but I feel like the movies that are closest to my heart are 'The Wackness' and '50/50' - the ones that are dramedies that have that human element to them. "

Jonathan Levine

I Can

Movies

" Do I wish I was Martin Scorsese? Yeah. But am I really proud of the movies I've made and really happy that I get to keep making them? Yes. "

" I've been a huge fan of Hal Ashby forever. And I think that the distinctive thing about 'Coming Home' is the love story, and how - kind of emotionally real it is, and how these two characters allow each other to see their - kind of vulnerabilities. And it's great because it's a love story that's not really that cheesy, either. "

" I was intimidated by Malkovich for, like, a couple of days, and then I wasn't. He's awesome. He's so cool. He was so wonderful to work with. "

Jonathan Levine

Awesome

Work

" I watched 'Return Of The Living Dead.' That one's cool, man. I like that one. "

" Genre is a really great shorthand you can have with an audience. In the same way you can use music to create a connection with an audience, it brings so much of their knowledge of what genre really is to the table. You have a shortcut to connect with them. I really like that. "

" I have a lot of friends with bad taste in music - some might say that I have bad taste in music. "

" I like zombie movies, and I like genre movies a lot. To watch. Less so to make, I think. But I grew up on that stuff. I would just grow up watching a lot of horror movies, a lot of slasher movies and then zombie movies. "

" I learned some big lessons on my first film, a horror film which was never released in the U.S., even though we sold it to Harvey Weinstein for a lot of money. "

" I always look at myself as kind of a work in progress. I hope that's not always the case. But for me, every film is a learning experience. "

" On '50/50,' even though it was 8 million dollars, it was all acting-intensive. "

" To be a director, you have to think you're the best. Ever since I went to film school, I imagined that you have to think deep down that you want to be Martin Scorsese or you want to be P.T. Anderson. Like, am I as good as those guys? Absolutely not. I feel like I keep learning, and I feel like I keep getting better. "

" I have a cameo in every movie. In '50/50,' I'm in the back of the bus. "

" I used to drive a convertible around L.A. a lot. "

" I love subverting expectations or playing with the sort of unspoken kind of connections that the audience has. "

" It's rare that movies can sort of capture the tone of life; movies always feel like they have to be one thing or another. "

" For whatever reason, the films I gravitate towards do have these strange sort of tonal balances to them... I kind of realized on '50/ 50' why I liked these blending of tones, because I think it's kind of what life is like: funny one minute, sad the next, scary the next. "

" For me, it's always more interesting to look at things when you don't really have a horse in the race, so to speak. "

Jonathan Levine

Look

Speak

" As a director, your expectation and reality don't always match up, and I think that that's... I think it's a little jarring. "

Jonathan Levine

Reality

Director

" The way 'Coming Home' uses music in general is incredible, but the final song that really kind of crescendos all of the emotion that the whole movie has kind of been building to is this song called 'Once I Was' by Tim Buckley. "

" I really like using genre to tell a story about characters but also use it as a Trojan horse to tell social or cultural commentary. That's where the best stuff, especially in the zombie genre, comes out of. "

Jonathan Levine

Horse

Story

" I think I'm always conscious of not letting things fit into a specific box. Being a filmmaker and trying to chart a career, you never want anyone to be able to pigeonhole you into one specific thing. "

" Zombies have always had a lot of built-in social commentary. "

" I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out. "

" I think that's the great thing about zombies, is, you know, going back to even 'Night of the Living Dead,' they've always been a tool for kind of holding up a mirror to us and showing us something about ourselves that we might not otherwise know. "

" For me, the best high school movie is, like, 'Fast Times' and what Cameron Crowe is like. "

Jonathan Levine

Fast

School

" If you know how to shoot a scene, then you know how to shoot an action scene. If you've seen an action movie, and you watched it, and you paid attention to how scenes are constructed and where the camera is and how the camera moves, then you know how to do it. "