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Film Director Quotes Part 2FILM DIRECTOR QUOTES PART 2
CLICK HERE to read Film Directors Quotes Part 1 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. Be smart, but never show it. 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. 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. 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. I think that film tends to penetrate the actor and distill the inherent quality in them that no matter what character they're playing, the film registers that quality that's sort of their essence, their soul. 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. Somebody said, if you give a script to five different famous directors, you'd get five different pictures. And I believe that. 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. The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it. The only safe thing is to take a chance. The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it. 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! 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. 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. If you respect the audience enough, they can take onboard many things. A great movie evolves when everybody has the same vision in their heads. 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. The end of a picture is always an end of a life. 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. Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. Every single art form is involved in film, in a way. 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. 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. A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion. A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again. 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! 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. Don't be told something is impossible. There's always a way. And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography. 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. It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one. 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. Each time you come away, you know, you learn something. You get better at your craft. 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. 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. Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out. 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. A lot of actors talk about doing their homework, but very few of them do it. Is it possible that there are no coincidences? 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. 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 A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit. Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about. But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing. A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here. I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue. 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. A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. Understand life's mysteries, - as mysteries to be lived.
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