James Mangold Quotations

When I was making 'Cop Land' in 1996, people were asking what my next movie was, ... Without thinking, I said, 'I want to make a movie about Johnny Cash.'Ã

I didn't want to make a movie about what we already know.

He was much more concerned about protecting others than himself. The thing he would always say to me was, 'I don't care if I look bad. Just don't make other, innocent people look bad, because they were my mistakes.'

John always said whoever played him, 'make sure they hold the guitar like they own it, that they don't hold it like it's a baby,'

I saw those songs they sang together as love scenes.

I think one of the most courageous things about Joaquin in that scene is that he sounds not perfect, not at all. He's not brilliant from the get-go, but he's got so much room to grow. And we grow Johnny Cash in the movie - until, by the end, he's awesome!

John was not just a singer, but a songwriter, ... He was always riding this river of shadows in his writing. He was singing about a kind of pain everyone lives through.

June and John are the last generation who can sing about these things first hand, ... The fact is, these people grew up in a field and they were singing about what they saw.

That's the mythic album where you see his face, sweaty, looking dangerous, and he's there singing to murderers and robbers and sharing a good time with them. As a kid, how could you not be interested?

Everybody had an idea about Joaquin and kind of his relationship, his darkness and the things he had done playing more cynical or dark roles, ... But this charisma when he gets behind the mike, the joy in him, the unmitigated joy you see in his face when he's watching Reese, and the love. These are things I feel we haven't seen before in his many roles.

It was unbelievably hard to get this done, ... Over the years, Johnny understood. He was patient beyond belief. I'd tell him that people are frightened of musical films, but even more so they're frightened of movies that require the talent to be successful in order for the film to be successful. It's much easier to make a comic book.

People don't remember how good the music was (back then)... There's some real blood and guts in that music.

The big thing that I wanted to do was touch on the very start of rock and roll, I loved this moment in rockabilly music. I loved the idea of people making music because they loved music and not because they saw the video or how to market themselves. A very big point for me in this movie is that John didn't arrive at Sun as the man in black. He didn't already know his marketing angle. He didn't have it worked out. He was just trying to be heard and however that would work or not work was fine, but he just needed to be heard. What was magic to me about that moment in time was that it was a moment before the term 'rock and roll star' existed.

They were each an antidote for the other. John had a hole in his heart... and June was an antidote... John was a real ambassador for her to the edge or away from a safe place as part of the first family of country music. It's the most wonderful set of opposites you could ever encounter.

There was something really adventurous going on at that moment with young people lashing out.

As we got to know John and June, what we needed them to understand was that the people they were now was not the people they were then, ... And there was the challenge of combining the grand wisdom and spirituality of these elder legends backwards into the young people they were, as they were learning those lessons. To tell how they got to be here, we had to go to those darker places, and not temper it.

The two of them have a lot in common, and I don't mean life story, ... I mean a kind of core energy.

There was a point when they got into enough of a groove that when they played for the extras in Memphis we felt the love,

I knew I wanted to make a movie about Johnny Cash since '96, but my first exposure to Cash was the live Folsom Prison album on my dad's shelf, ... I saw Cash's incredibly ravaged face with a rivulet of sweat running down his cheek on the cover. And when I listened to it, I heard all these men cheering - guys in prison. He's singing about murder and they're all cheering. There's such an incredibly rebellious attitude in that material and such danger that even as a kid it stood out to me.

I had the advantage of making a movie about a man who was an artist himself, and an artist of the shadows, in the sense that he understood life's lonelinesses and life's mistakes, and that people make them. In that sense, he wasn't interested in hiding them.

I remember being real concerned about the music and singing -- that's something we were both concerned about -- and Jim said if people want to hear Johnny Cash, they can get a Johnny Cash record, he's made a few.

Can't you just hire someone who sounds good?

All you have to do is listen over and over and over again to any one of his songs. Even when they first started appearing in the early to middle '50s, the lyrics are incredibly dark. Everyone else is singing about getting girls and being happy, and he's singing about, 'I go out on a party and look for a little fun, but I find a darkened corner, because I still miss someone.' That's a dark lyric for a pop song.

There's a level where the themes of a film are very relevant to me and also the idea of finding out how relevant one genre is to another. I think that westerns and samurai films and superhero films have a lot in common. It's just that the scale of the visuals in tentpole films can sometimes overwhelm the drama.

I love comic books. Since I was a kid, I've collected them.

You see the assets of your actors and you see their strengths and you try to play into them. It's like I feel part of my job is as a coach. I'm putting a team on the field and you want to formulate how to make the best game out of these players.

The one aspect I do love about digital is I love to push performance and I love to roll and roll and keep doing takes in a single performance.

Having the kind of infinite loop of what a digital stream is - you can shoot for a long time without cutting - allows me to sometimes perform really exciting things.

My own sense and taste in 3D films has been I don't really like it when it feels like it's a gimmick and it's coming at me, it's flying at me.

The funny thing about me is I move from genre to genre, but I essentially shoot all the movies the same way.

Filmmakers get into trouble when they're watching too many DVDs and quoting all the time.

Just because your leg might heal doesn't mean it doesn't feel broken. It doesn't mean that a car hitting your body doesn't hurt like the same it would hurt if a car hit your body.

The idea of devoting two years of my life to making a corporate product that looks and smells and tastes like a lot of other things out there with just a different trademark character is a bore.

What I'm really focused on is the majesty of the best films I see are films that don't panhandle for an extra laugh later, but actually deliver the goods. And when the screen goes black, you go, Yes.

We're all going to hell for the songs we sing.

If you respect the events and respect the real life tragedy, you can drive your film to address it in some mature way.

A fantasy film is often improved by some kind of human reality.

I'd be really interested in making a dramatic, low key 3D film.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

There's a level of immersion that is perfect and there's a level that, for my taste, starts to actually exceed what the screen can provide. At that point, you're kind of overexceeding yourself.

One of my favourite movies is Billy Wilder's 'The Apartment.' It's shot in super wide screen, and it's beautiful.

The boundary between real life and acting is hard to find.

I'm a huge comic book collector. When I was a kid, I had both Marvel and DC. I was my own librarian. I made card files. I had origin stories of all the characters, and cross-referenced when they appeared in other comic books. I was full on.

For me, making a lot of dramas on one side it's a different sort of challenge, and on the other, it's not a challenge at all, meaning that my goal is to try and bring the realism and acting you might find in a straight drama with the intentions and conflict, where it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek, but rather committed and real.

I'm really very lucky. I get to do an awful lot. I've been able to make an incredibly wide range of movies and work with an incredible array of people.

We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.

As for the Folsom Prison show, ... would anybody have the guts to do that show now 50 Cent, maybe I think the whole idea of even playing to a crowd of people like that is so politically unfavorable now - it's like, 'What are you doing, singing for these people Do they deserve it' There's such anger in our culture right now, that kind of grace and forgiveness, we don't see that very often.