Quotes About Directors

Most Chinese filmmakers grew up watching television; they watched films on television, not in cinemas. The scope of their vision is not big enough, they're not yet detail-oriented enough. You have to watch films in cinemas for years to understand the depth and scope of vision needed in filmmaking. Directors in China usually come from an academic background; they graduate as film directors. Whereas the directors from Hong Kong learn their trade on sets, beginning at the lowest rung.

I love being on sets with very seasoned directors as well as very new directors. Every time is a discovery process. You learn something new every time.

I love to take chances. I love first-time directors. I love super-low-budget movies. I've done 80-something movies, and I want to just keep experimenting. First-time directors have new, fresh ideas, and lot of times they're risking a lot to do it, so it means so much to them. They're not just hired; they have their heart on the line, because if you've gone that far, you're probably a very passionate person.

The director's who want to be innovative use the DVD as a tool to see what people have done in the past and you have other people who will actually take from better directors and that makes them better directors.

I go where the material is, and I feel like I'm looking for really strong directors. That's the key ingredient. There are some directors I would move the sun and earth for, or stop the rotation of the planets, just to work with them.

Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it's the purest way to tell a story. It's about creating images that tell a story and you don't need dialogue for that.

The hardest thing for a film actor, especially if you are in a lot of the film, is sustaining energy for the entire length of a production. It's quite tough. With acting, it's not the same as directing. Directors work the exact same hours; directing is incredibly exhausting. The only difference is that directors aren't required to have bursts of energy and focus. They're probably focused the entire day. Actors have this thing of "stop/start." That can be quite draining, actually.

You start out with big dreams and I mean, big dreams artistically. You want to work with the greatest living directors, make a great movie. I wanted to make a great love story, I wanted to make a great epic and then you realize that the truth of it is that it's so hard to make a great film. It's hard to get a great role. Those big expectations change to realism pretty quickly. But what's never changed is my desire to work with great directors and to find projects that push me out of my comfort zone and keep me alive. I still don't think I've done my best work

There are a lot of female directors in Lebanon but we can't really talk about a true film industry, it's still very small. But we do have a few female directors.

It's not often I get to do a film that turns out good. Plus, there just aren't that many great directors out there. There are a thousand different decisions that need to be made with each script and it's the good directors that can make those decisions. It's a long and complicated process in regards to what looks good on paper. Working on a bad film can be fun too. It can be a good exercise that gets you writing.

Some people feel like you need to have a very specialized understanding of music to have the authority to talk about it. They are such good directors that it's perfectly possible to have conceptual and directorial and storytelling conversations about music without needing to know all the technical pieces.

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery.

If Martin Scorsese calls, I am available. And then there the ones, well, you can just run down the list - any of those Oscar-nominated films, they have amazing directors across the board.

I think one third of my work is with first-time directors because I think I should, you know? Really, the difference between a first-time director and a second- or third-time director - I mean there's no director who makes enough movies anyway - but if they're talented, they have it. And there is no movie that is perfect.

My first professional audition - god, I've never told anybody about this - was for a test commercial, I think it was for Xbox. It involved me getting kidnapped by a granny who wanted to play the Xbox. It was very weird and I definitely had no idea what I was doing. I actually got the gig. It wasn't a commercial; it was what directors did when they wanted to show the company what they would do with a commercial.

I love the work, I love being in front of the camera and working with actors and directors and creating something. For me, it's like learning everyday.

There are a lot of scripts that you can like, but rarely are there directors attached when you're in development with something and that's stressful.

Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

Bad directors will tell you they absolutely know how to do it, and how it has to happen; there's this insecurity that leads them to feeling like they have to control everything.

The bigger the budget, the more people that you have to coordinate and it's not easy to do that always because, not only do people have trouble communicating in that way, but often there are internal disagreements and everybody is not necessarily on the same page. Even in a big-budget movie with famous actors and directors, everybody could be on a completely different page. The director has to figure out a way of getting everybody on the same page, more or less, and keeping them there.

I guess I'm not jaded because I still believe that there are good films out there, and there are great directors, and there are great writers. It just takes a little bit more perseverance and a little bit more time to find [them].

There are only so many hilarious actors so when they cross-pollinate, people assume it's always the same actors and directors.

Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.

Usually directors hire me because I'm what they are looking for. But once in a while, and it's very rare, they will hire me and then try to make me over.

Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

My advice to other female directors would be to pay no heed to naysayers. Women can be united in the fact that there has always been someone in our lives who has told us "it can't be done" or "there is only so much you can do." We are constantly encouraged to think that being born a woman means we were born with limited choices and compromised dreams.

Actors, writers, directors - that triumvirate of creativity - we have to rely and trust each other to be able to get to the final product.

All I mean is, I'm not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it's not very loud. That doesn't mean I don't like the movie.

I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

I think stupidity in business is really an interesting thing. What winds up happening is a disconnect between your company's strategic management and then your more applied on-the-street management. I guarantee with you that the board of directors of most companies has no idea what the costs of hiring people really is in the HR department.

Learn how to draw. It's the basis of what we [animation directors] do. Keep a sketchbook. Try making a very simple little film. Try and tell a story clearly and entertainingly. Study the way people move and animate move. Observe all you can, and try and capture that simply in a few lines on paper.

There's a paraphrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all.

I worked for John Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, Raoul Walsh - I worked for some real good directors.

Directors typically have three choices - you do a studio movie and get a paycheck up front, you do an independent movie, which is for your heart and you don't get paid up front and probably don't make any money on it, but it hopefully goes to Sundance and is more of an art movie, and then you do TV.

To suddenly be working with one of the top-10 directors in the world, plus the film was in China, I almost blurted out, "How much do I have to pay?" It was just like a dream come true. That was an amazing experience.

I just want to play interesting characters, and I want to work with the best directors I can work with.

You have to have a thick enough skin to cope with the criticism. I'm very self-critical and I have a lot of friends that I trust who are film directors and writers and people in my profession.

What I want to do is create great content on television and movies. It is not my role to program only for Latinos, and you can't really assume that Hispanics only want Hispanic content. But I do think that we are severely underrepresented in television and film. And instead of complaining about not seeing ourselves, we should become film producers, directors, and writers, and tell our story.

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the directors eyes, you get it right does not allow for very much creative freedom... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.

If you're creative, they let you be the showrunner, producer. The first thing my partner and I did as producers was hire ourselves as directors - because who else would hire me?

I happen to have worked with male directors who don't understand women at all. Not at all. I'm flabbergasted by their ignorance.

I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.

I had people in 'Entertainment Weekly' talking about how they wanted to throttle me because they thought I was too disgustingly cute, as if that were my fault, you know, as if that was my fault, not the fault of directors and producers and such.

It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.

There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

There's no such thing as "an auteurist filmmaker." Every film directors is an auteur. We only make films that we do because we cannot put on clothes that don't fit us.