Top 89 Quotes by Jon Favreau

You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.

Unfortunately, we are not painters and authors, where we can do something in isolation. We require a lot of money to create what we create. It's almost like being an architect: You can't be an architect and build whatever buildings you want to.

To see talented people in roles that others might not see them in, to see how they might fit in the puzzle of the cast, has always been something that I've been good at. I think that if you look at the successes of my films and start to peel them back, there's usually a really smart casting decision that has gone into that success.

I think that part of the reason that 'Iron Man' was so successful was that we really chose to break new ground in a new area tonally, cast wise, the way we depict the hero, what his abilities are. It felt fresh in a genre that is beginning to feel stale if it's not done with the proper amount of inspiration and a strong voice or tone.

I think what is nice about 'Elf,' and why it doesn't play as one long sketch, is that the character actually grows up during the course of the film. It's not just a character that you can keep checking in on and keep doing sketches about. It's a story. I'm pretty proud of how we told it.

When you're going for a big studio comedy, the joke tally better be pretty high, and you better have some big comedy set pieces. That was one of the issues when I was trying to get 'Swingers' made for the first time, which is that there weren't any broad comedy set pieces.