[Lyndon Baines ] Johnson is a big and larger-than-life guy, we just tried to give him the dynamic range that he actually had.
JAY ROACH[Lyndon Baines ] Johnson is a big and larger-than-life guy, we just tried to give him the dynamic range that he actually had.
JAY ROACHI hope we’re all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there’s not only sort of a film geek audience, there’s also a general interest in the overall film consuming population.
JAY ROACHSometimes perfecting the one thing can be the enemy of getting any traction on anything else.
JAY ROACHWhen Dalton Trumbo and his friends joined the Communist Party it was 1943, and Russia was our ally in World War II. This was connected to a very popular movement of artists and intellectuals at that time towards anti fascism, and an alliance with the union movement.
JAY ROACHFrom our perspective now, there is a not a huge understanding about the totalitarian Communism that Soviet Russia practiced during the 1950s – it was an atrocious system.
JAY ROACHJohn Wayne was never shy about that fervor, but because he was never overly zealous about his politics, and of course his status as a movie, he was embraced by both the right and the left.
JAY ROACHI wish I was sort of someone like Woody Allen who can stage everything in one long master shot, no coverage; just, you know, that’s it.
JAY ROACHI always had a respect and an admiration for people who got into politics. I certainly have always been interested in law and political science.
JAY ROACHThis is a movie version of the play [All the Way]and when Bryan [Cranston] was on stage the bigness of the man was played to the back of the house. When we turned the cameras on that, it changed a bit with close-ups, but we got just as much power in that beautiful intimacy.
JAY ROACHSometimes I would like the opportunity to do character-driven comedy and that’s really what I was trying to do in Meet The Parents. I think in a way this is a more old fashioned type of comedy.
JAY ROACH[ Dalton Trumbo] always said he fought so many fights, all seemingly different, but all about the concepts of fairness and justice.
JAY ROACHThe commentary track became a lot like the movie and there are some funny, long, awkward pauses that you can tell we’re just trying to find stuff to say. None of us had gotten to really talk about the movie until that moment and they were in New York and we were in L.A.
JAY ROACHI love Dr. Evil [from Austin Powers] as a walking, talking, narcissistic manifestation of everything screwed up about human existence – his desire to take over the world, and have the world reflect his own power lust.
JAY ROACHThe success of the second ‘Austin Powers’ caught us by surprise a little bit. We had decided not to do even a second one, unless the audience wanted it and we could do something better.
JAY ROACHFor Bryan [Cranston ] to go back in time and become this larger-than-life and somewhat theatrical guy, who performed his ideas and rhetoric in public in a melodic and flashy way, was a bit of a risk.
JAY ROACHSometimes you fall in love with some things and then you fall out of love with it.
JAY ROACH