The Disaster Artist Quotes

“The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“The only casting directors who’d be willing to call Tommy in on the basis of this headshot were the ones curious about what it was like to be murdered.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“In the love scene’s final shot, Johnny gets out of bed and walks bare-assed to the bathroom. Tommy thought long and hard about his decision to show his ass. “I need to do it,” he told me. “I have to show my ass or this movie won’t sell.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“If art is expression, can it fail? Is success simply a matter of what one does with failure?”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Mark responds to Peter’s accusation with an uncharacteristically abrupt burst of anger and tries to throw Peter off the roof. Then Mark immediately apologizes to Peter for trying to kill him, and Peter lets it slide. It’s probably the most swiftly forgiven attempted murder in the history of film.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Dan had some questions about Chris-R. We all did. Why the name “Chris-R,” for instance? What’s with that hyphen? Tommy’s explanation: “He is gangster.” What about this drug business, which never comes up either before or after Chris-R’s only scene in the film? “We have big problem in society with the drugs.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Tommy removed his sunglasses and glanced back at me. He had tears in his eyes. He smiled, nodded, and turned toward the screen. It wasn’t often that you got to see a man whose dream was literally about to come true, but then the lights went down, and I couldn’t see him anymore.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“With that, Tommy went off to do his seagull thing elsewhere on set—making a lot of irritating noise while simultaneously shitting on everyone.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“I was a tall, sandy-blond Northern California kid. Tommy, meanwhile, appeared to have been grown somewhere dark and moist.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Upon its debut, The Room was a spectacular bomb, pulling in all of $1,800 during its initial two-week Los Angeles run. It wasn’t until the last weekend of the film’s short release that the seeds of its eventual cultural salvation were planted. While passing a movie theater, two young film students named Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner noticed a sign on the ticket booth that read: NO REFUNDS. Below the sign was this blurb from a review: “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” They were sold.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“You have built a human relationship on the foundation of asbestos.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“No one was laughing now. But I had a thought, a thought I can’t fully explain, even today: He should be my next scene partner. I have to do a scene with this guy. Maybe he’d cheer me up. Maybe I’d learn some of his fearlessness. What made him so confident? I was desperately curious to discover that. It wasn’t his acting, obviously, which was extraordinarily bad. He was simply magically uninhibited; the only person in our class—or any class I’d ever taken, for that matter—whom I actually looked forward to watching perform. The rest of us were toying with chemistry sets and he was lighting the lab on fire.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Don’t you take the past and just put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there? That’s what I do. And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key. Say, “Open up, step inside.” But you can’t because it’s dark. And there are demons. — Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“That's the thing with Tommy: Even before he was famous, he acted like he was famous. Maybe that's what, in the end, best explains him. Maybe that's what explains the whole thing.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“In the end, Tommy made me realize that you decide who you become. He also made me realize what a mixed blessing that can be.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“It was striking to see my family loving this cinematic abomination as much as they were. The room was filled with laughter from beginning to end—huge, bright, joyful laughter. We finished watching it at 1:00 a.m. Our cheeks hurt, our stomachs ached, and we felt closer to one another than we had in a long time.... Their response to The Room was a powerful indicator of what this film would do on a much larger scale.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Right after we sat down, Don turned around and said, “Oh, by the way—I checked online. This is going to be on your IMDb for the rest of your life.” I offered Don a courtesy laugh, after which he went back to munching his popcorn.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Before I met Tommy, I would not have day-tripped to the spot where James Dean died. There would have been too many critical voices in my head telling me how dumb and pointless such a trip would be. Tommy, though, made me realize I could drive to James Dean’s crash site for the simple reason that I felt like doing it. He made me realize that doing such things was the whole point of being young. This was not an attitude that came easily to me, but I could say or do anything around Tommy and he wouldn’t judge me. How could he? He was the weirdest person I’d ever met—but lovably weird. Around Tommy I could be who I wanted to be—and to me that felt like freedom.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“We argue, as you know. I don't think she like me, but so what. I say how I feel. Feelings. That's all we have as human beings.' - Tommy”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“You could even say that The Room is about Steven or, at least, about Stevenness, a condition in which things happen for no clear reason, to an unknown purpose, at a fascinatingly inopportune time. Steven completely saves the end of The Room by reminding us how weird it really is.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“For reasons neither I nor anyone else could gather, every time I got to the part in Mark’s story about the woman being beaten up, Tommy would laugh warmly before delivering his line. It was unsettling. It was disturbing. Take after take, Tommy/Johnny would react to the story of this imaginary woman’s hospitalization with fond and accepting laughter.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Probably the most wasteful and pointless aspect of The Room’s production was Tommy’s decision to simultaneously shoot his movie with both a 35mm film camera and a high-definition (HD) camera. In 2002, an HD and 35mm film camera cost around $250,000 combined; the lenses ran from $20,000 to $40,000 apiece. And, of course, you had to hire an entirely different crew to operate this stuff. Tommy had a mount constructed that was able to accommodate both the 35mm camera and HD camera at the same time, meaning Tommy needed two different crews and two different lighting systems on set at all times. The film veterans on set had no idea why Tommy was doing this. Tommy was doing this because he wanted to be the first filmmaker to ever do so. He never stopped to ask himself why no one else had tried.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Watching Tommy perform this scene, I wondered what his psychologist or psychiatrist had made of him. I tried to image Tommy's mind from the inside out. I saw burning forests, blind alleys, volcanoes in the desert, city streets that plunged into the ocean, barricades everywhere, and all of it lit in the deep-cherry light of emergency.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“This book is about what might be the world’s most improbable Hollywood success story. At its center is an enigmatic filmmaker who claims, among many other things, to be a vampire. This man speaks with a thick European accent, the derivation of which he won’t identify. He also refuses to reveal his age or the origins of his seemingly vast fortune. His name is Tommy Wiseau; and the film he wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and poured $6 million into is a disastrous specimen of cinematic hubris called The Room.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“You see," Tommy said. "You act like crazy man first in class and now on highway. It's midnight and you are lost like hell. But that's okay. Don't need to have panicky situation. No restrictions. Be yourself.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“That, really, was Sandy’s choice: Tommy’s naked ass or Steven Spielberg’s director of photography.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“The dialogue Tommy composed for the flower shop scene, which flies back and forth like some sort of postmodern 'Who's on First?' sketch, has the super-compresed density of experimental verse:

Hi
Can I help you
Yeah can I have a dozen roses please
Oh hi Johnny I didn't know it was you here you go
That's me how much is it
That'll be eighteen dollars
Here you go keep the change hi doggie
You're my favorite customer
Thanks a lot bye
Bye bye”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“I started showing them some of Tommy’s greatest acting hits. “Oh my God,” one of them said, laughing. “This is so terrible.” Another one, looking back so as not to be overheard by anyone, said, “Seriously, Greg. Does he think this is serious? This is real?” “Completely,” I said. “Tommy thinks this is the next Streetcar Named Desire.” “What’s he planning to do with this movie?” “Submit it to the Academy Awards.” Everyone laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. That was Tommy’s stated goal.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“Tommy showed me around, starting with the photos on the walls, many of which were of himself, including a few grand, framed neoclassical portraits he’d had done.”
― Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made