Film Director Quotes - Part 1 Famous Diector Quotes

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters. --Robert Altman As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it. --Darren Aronofsky What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle. You have got to think fast in this business, you've got to keepreinventing yourself to stay on top. --Michael Bay If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. --Kathryn Bigelow You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy. --Peter Bogdanovich Art is a sense of magic. --Stan Brakhage My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images. --James Broughton Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who's very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real. --Tim Burton Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee. --James Cameron A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. --Frank Capra In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum. --John Carpenter

I use dancing to embellish, extend or enlarge upon an existing emotion. --Gower Champion The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues. --George Clooney We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality. --Ethan Coen I do think that's so much a part of what being a director is - in working with actors - to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be. --Bill Condon I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians. --Francis Ford Coppola A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction? --Wes Craven In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about. --Cameron Crowe And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town. --Frank Darabont Acting is by far and away the toughest job, in terms of film-making and maybe even the arts. How they do it I don't know, but they have to be allowed to get their satisfaction. --Jonathan Demme First cuts are a bitch for a director, because it's been so many months and you put your trust in your editor and you're going to see your film assembled for the first time. You look at it and go, This is terrible. I hate it. --Richard Donner Our feeling is that the most important thing on a set is that actors have enough confidence to try different things. If there's stress or tension, they won't go out on a limbbecause they won't want to embarrass themselves if they don't feel completely comfortable. --Peter Farrelly over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch. --David Fincher

Casting is 65 percent of directing. --John Frankenheimer I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior. --William Friedkin Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters. --Samuel Fulle It takes two years on the stage for an actor or an actress to learn how to speak correctly and to manage his voice properly, and it takes about ten years to master the subtle art of being able to hold one's audience. --D. W. Griffith But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. --Taylor Hackford A theme that has always interested me is the difference between how thing appear and how they are. Image versus reality, etc. --Curtis Hanson I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! --Howard Hawks People watch luck go by them, and they're so blind they never reach out and grab it. George Roy Hill One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges. --Ron Howard Most of my characters are romantic rather than sexual. I think that's an essential difference in my pictures. I think they are more accurate in portraying young people as romantic - as wanting a relationship, an understanding with a member of the opposite sex more than just physical sex. --John Hughes Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity. --Chuck Jones Movies are art and the spirit of the movie depends on the creators. --Lloyd Kaufman

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas. --Philip Kaufman A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do. --Elia Kazan A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. --Stanley Kubrick Everyone has a story. --Neil LaBute A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there. --Spike Lee All I try to do is create an atmosphere that seems comfortable enough, that it removes tension and everyone feels free. If they feel free then behaviour happens, small moments happen and that's what ultimately works the best for me. --Barry Levinson I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with. --Richard Linklater But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies. --George Lucas For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident. --Sidney Lumet I let the actors work out their ideas before shooting, then tell them what attitudes I want. If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb. --David Lynch The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. --John Huston I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas. --Jim Jarmusch

Film Director Quotes Part 2

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows. --Louis Malle Be smart, but never show it. --Louis B. Mayer Commitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down. --David McNally I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance. --Sam Mendes A lot of directors don't know what they want to do. Every director I've seen that was a good director that I've admired knew exactly what he wanted to do. They didn't sit there and think about it. --John Milius I think that film tends to penetrate the actor and distill the inherent quality in them that nomatter what character they're playing, the film registers that quality that's sort of their essence, their soul. --Rebecca Miller You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that. --Anthony Minghella Somebody said, if you give a script to five different famous directors, you'd get five different pictures. And I believe that. --Vincente Minnelli People tend to work in teams, in a collaborative way, in an informal network. If you create an environment like that, it's much more effective and much more efficient. --Jim Mitchell The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it. --Errol Morris The only safe thing is to take a chance. --Mike Nichols

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it. --Christopher Nolan Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store! --Phillip Noyce I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do. --Trevor Nunn The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting. --Brian De Palma If you respect the audience enough, they can take onboard many things. --Nick Park A great movie evolves when everybody has the same vision in their heads. --Alan Parker That's how I like to do it with actors, have them really go for it and I'll tell them when it's too much. It's always easier to bring it back then to push it further. --Alexander Payne The end of a picture is always an end of a life. --Sam Peckinpah We like Batman - we understand him, we suffer with him. On the other hand, we want to be Superman. But they're conflicting philosophies. Let's bring them together in one movie and see how we, as an audience, wrestle with our inner demons. --Wolfgang Petersen Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. --Roman Polanski Every single art form is involved in film, in a way. --Sydney Pollack When you make the audience the critic, though, when you start asking them to speak about the film, all these weird moments that are way out of the ordinary, that we do a lot of in our pictures, they don't hold up to critical analysis from an untrained professional critic very well. --Sam Raimi In terms of the feeling of the piece, I cant think about what people are gonna think about it, what are the critics gonna say, I'm trying to bring some resolution, and realize that myself. It's a struggle; it's a process that gets us this. --Godfrey Reggio

A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion. --Karel Reisz A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again. --Jean Renoir If somebody has a better idea than me, I'll take it if it surpasses what we have on the page because at the end of the day, it's me that takes the credit anyway! --Guy Ritchie I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves. --Jay Roach Don't be told something is impossible. There's always a way. --Robert Rodriguez And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a directorwithout learning the craft of cinematography. --Nicolas Roeg A good character is always slightly unexpected, or a character that makes a turn or where you can see the character arc and watch he/she develop... not obvious... obviously a good guy or bad guy. --George A. Romero It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one. --Alan Rudolph If you don't have the story and the unfolding of the trajectory of the saga, it's like getting in a car and not having any gas. --Gus Van Sant Each time you come away, you know, you learn something. You get better at your craft. --John Sayles Humor of a sort is never very far away, I hope, because I like to look at things with an amused eye, because that is what I am. --John Schlesinger Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors. --Paul Schrader Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out. --Martin Scorsese

People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. --Ridley Scott A lot of actors talk about doing their homework, but very few of them do it. --Tony Scott Is it possible that there are no coincidences? --M. Night Shyamalan I'm actually part of a number of minorities. I grew up being a horribly awkward kid. A terrible student. And now I find myself as a filmmaker, and you feel kind of alone in the world because you're separate from everyone else. --Bryan Singer Anyone that comes from any medium, whether it they come off the bus to Hollywood for the first time or they're established musicians, if they come to act, they have to have respect for the craft --John Singleton A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit. --Steven Soderbergh Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about. --Steven Spielberg But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing. --Oliver Stone A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here. --Quentin Tarantino I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue. --Guillermo del Toro I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing. --Peter Weir A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. --Billy Wilder Understand life's my