Sam Mendes Quotes

It's a risk casting anyone against type or what they're known to do. But there's one thing better than having a great actor, which is having a great actor who's never done what you're asking him to do. He's hungry to get out of the trailer every day and hungry to test himself.

I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.

Directing Skyfall was one of the best experiences of my professional life, but I have theatre and other commitments, including productions of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and King Lear, that need my complete focus over the next year and beyond.

I am not a master-class director. I am not a teacher. I am a coach. I dont have a methodology. Each actor is different. And on the film set, you have to be next to them all.

I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.

When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don't want to see black and white.

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.

Politicizing of kids starts with pregnancy, of course. You shouldn't be drinking wine. You can't be smoking, either. The poor woman is poked and prodded and touched and obsessed over.

Shooting action is very, very meticulous, it's increments, tiny little pieces.

As a first-time director in America, I feel I've been very fortunate.

All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

The moment you have kids, you are prey to judgment, but you also become a judge. You find yourself going, "Can you believe what she did with such-and-such?" at school.

The joy of a road movie is its very simple narrative nature, which is that you know you're going to go through different places and you're going to meet new people. At the same time, you have to not make it feel too obvious and too crudely episodic.

I feel like the American years were my apprenticeship for doing a Bond movie.

You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.

Listen, you make a big movie, you're going into the Coliseum, and people are going to give you the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that's part of the game. It's part of the fun as well.

I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

There have been screenwriters who I'm sure would gladly kill me, because I've been very fast and loose with their work, because I felt like it wasn't up to my high standards. I would push and pull it on set, and make changes all the time. But then when you're working with an original screenplay, my theater instincts kick in, and I suddenly become very keeper-of-the-words.

You've got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie's good enough, it's going to survive; and if it's not, well, it won't.

Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.

I've made movies that cost less than one car chase.

There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.

I think with Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense, people are much more open to something that is different.

Kevin and Annette ... I wanted them to do it together. They clearly wanted to work with each other.

Learn to say, "I don't know the answer." It could be the beginning of a very good day's rehearsal.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

Children make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?"

I wanted to keep exploring ... I'm not about to choose a series of movies in which I can use the same bag of tricks and style that I used in the first film.

One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is ... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this.

The importance of rehearsal is maybe you want to talk about how the scene's going to be designed, how it's going to be staged, all of those things. It's all about preparation, and deciding what mutually you don't want to do, rather than necessarily what you do.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.

If you lived through the shooting of Jaws, you can live through anything.

Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.

I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself.