Lorenzo di Bonaventura quotes:

As a producer, I try to bring as many nice people as I can to insure that there's no screaming, there's no shouting, there's no bullying. The more of those kind of people that you can bring together, the better the experience everyone has on set.

I think when you're doing something cutting edge like 'The Matrix,' it might mean when everybody's saying 'no' that you're really on the right track.

It's so hard to find a director who, when you look at their body of work, you like everything.

What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.

I always believe, with any kind of hero, that you want to believe that their decision-making is right. That ultimately, I can trust what that guy's sense of right and wrong will be. Even in a vigilante movie, where you are going against the law by definition, you still want to agree with the fact that your character is breaking the law.

I don't like the term 'ensemble.' It's bland to me.

As a filmmaker you have to keep asking yourself the question are we really going to impress them [audience] either by the wow factor, the intelligence factor, the I didn't see that coming factor?

My experiences with the older audience and, selectively, the people I hang out with or run into, they all want to see Arnold [Schwarzenegger] kick some ass.

One of the things that's driving films in a particular direction is that the after market value of them is dropping really fast and in many segments of it, not just DVDs. Pay television is dropping.

Our world faces incredible economic uncertainty. The notion of what is a super power has evolved, and who actually can carry what muscle has changed.

If the studio wants to spend money on making your movie better, let them.

But fundamentally, I don't think of it as an alien-invasion movie; everybody's here, kind of, right? So, I think it's probably more of an action-adventure picture, if I actually had to qualify it.

The action pictures I've been typically involved with, when somebody gets punched, you really feel the punching, and when somebody gets shot, you really feel the shot.

My experience is that you can't possibly win against whatever the tidal wave is that's coming at you.

The amount of piracy is extraordinary. People don't realize how big it is.

Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.

The hardest thing, as a producer, is to find a director who does the picture for all the right reasons, and not just because they know it's successful or that they can do a good job, but in their bones, they love that genre.

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

I mean, I'm not a contrarian.

I think that running a studio gave me an appetite for making a lot of different kinds of movies and it's given me the opportunity to do that.

I think what's fun of making a Transformers movie is that it gets to be all of the above. I think, thematically, this movie is ... because of the third movie, you can ask questions in this movie you couldn't ask in the previous films. Like I was referring to the fact that they were abandoned by humans in the previous film; their attitude is different, so we've been able to tackle different themes.

I used to do a stunt in almost every movie. When I became an executive, all the insurance guys freaked out.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

I'm not looking for is the audience going to like it [the film during the first screening] or not. I want to hear somebody try to poke a hole in it. I want to hear why they saw the logic was flawed or why that scene was not believable.

My backpack has seven or eight DVDs in it and four or five of them have been there three months and I'm desperate to get to them.

We've never pulled from the toy line. We've always pulled from the mythology. What's great is there's so much mythology, so there's always stuff to pull from that. It never lines up perfectly for a movie; it's just like adapting a book or anything else, you know? But you come up with things to create, you come up with different ideas, but fundamentally the ideas always start from the mythology.

I always consult five to ten people who are hardcore fans, to see how far I can push a role. When they go, "Wait a second, you can't do that! That's a sin!," you go, "Okay, fine, we're not going to do that. We tried too far."