To me, there are saints every day. They stand up and help others and live for others and do things for others.
Theodore Melfi
You have a responsibility to make inclusion a daily thought, so we can get rid of the word ‘inclusion.’
Theodore Melfi
Family is just the people you care about. We can bond with people that we have nothing in common with, even if it’s just for a moment.
Theodore Melfi
We don’t have parades for mathematicians, we have parades for astronauts. You don’t think about all the thousands of people who worked on that capsule and crunched the numbers and were integral in getting that into space.
Theodore Melfi
The journey of making ‘Hidden Figures’ has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.
Theodore Melfi
NASA didn’t give a crap what gender you were or what race you were. If you could do the math, you were valuable.
Theodore Melfi
We’re all humans. Any human can tell any human’s story. I don’t want to have this conversation about black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.
Theodore Melfi
After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.
Theodore Melfi
The concept of ‘family’ has changed so much. It’s not just ‘mom and dad’ anymore. It’s ‘mom and mom’ and ‘dad and dad,’ and it’s kind of beautiful.
Theodore Melfi
For me, as a feminist, as somebody who wants to lift up women – because I do; I come from a single mom who raised three boys on her own – I feel like, you close the door on women, you close the door on humanity.
Theodore Melfi
You know what the truth is? You don’t find Bill Murray. Bill Murray finds you.
Theodore Melfi
One thing that’s nice about doing a movie about people that hardly anyone knows, you never worry if they’re a perfect match.
Theodore Melfi
Floyd Thompson, a white man, desegregated NASA. Period.
Theodore Melfi
The fact is this: NASA was desegregated by a white male. NASA was not desegregated by a black male. NASA was not desegregated by white women.
Theodore Melfi
As a director, you’re open to any kind of criticism.
Theodore Melfi
We’re very, very flawed, myself included.
Theodore Melfi
Change is incremental. Change is small.
Theodore Melfi
I think if characters change too much, it’s unrealistic; their whole fabric of who they are as a person doesn’t just disappear.
Theodore Melfi
My wife says I have happy delusions. I’m delusional that way. I just say, ‘This is how it’s got to be, and it’s got to be.’ I don’t take no. I just don’t like no. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s just how I am.
Theodore Melfi
If you don’t have comedy in a movie, you don’t have a movie.
Theodore Melfi
Life is laughter.
Theodore Melfi
If you don’t infuse humor into a subject matter, no matter how dark, the audience can’t accept the message of a film. It closes them down. Humor can open them up.
Theodore Melfi
By the time I got to ‘St Vincent,’ I had shot so many scenarios I was ready for anything – I’ve shot kangaroos, I’ve shot dogs, cats, crowds, fight scenes, stunts, comedy, drama, handheld, dolly, helicopter, crane – I just felt that there was nothing I was unprepared for.
Theodore Melfi
I have a very strict philosophy that if you’re not working out, you’re getting fat.
Theodore Melfi
I have to shoot and work out and play and discover all the time.
Theodore Melfi
I think the commercial world is a lateral step from features. Some people see it as a step down, but I’ve never understood that.
Theodore Melfi
A Sunday matinee is a good time for families to go to a movie.
Theodore Melfi
I can’t stand toe-to-toe with Bill Murray. It’s very hard, because just looking at Bill – he’s 6’3″”, and he just stares at you, and you have no idea what’s going on inside that mind of his.
Theodore Melfi
I was a good student. I started college at 16 years old and did okay.
Theodore Melfi
I think math is exciting, you know.
Theodore Melfi
I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable… I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.
Theodore Melfi
I try not to write for actors because A, they’re not the character, and B, it’s really depressing when you don’t get them.
Theodore Melfi
People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle.
Theodore Melfi