Art Directors Quotes

God sends such purgations to you, directors of consciences, that you may acquire the science of the saints and the art of directing souls. You will suffer also in another way. Love will be your executioner. Let it do its work; it knows how. In this martyrdom we have need of extraordinary grace and strength; but God will bestow it. Without this divine help it would be impossible to bear up. ~ Paul Of The Cross

By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, 'my kind' were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors. ~ Jerry Della Femina

I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with. Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art. ~ Richard Corliss

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. ~ Jock Sturges

I personally want to work with great directors and great actors. My thing is about being inspired. You want money to come, but money doesn't always come with great art. At the end of the day, it's about being satisfied with yourself as a human being. It's important to me to try to make that happen. ~ Scott Cohen

The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors. ~ Alexander Kluge

It is only the untalented director who imagines him or herself in every part, wants his or her own thoughts and emotions portrayed; it is only the untalented who make their own limitations those of the actors as well. ~ Liv Ullmann

Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they're the director's vision, but really, they're huge collaborations between directors, writers, actors, even producers. ~ Ted Naifeh

I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director. ~ Arne Glimcher

A lot of times there were big mistakes, but I would show the art director and he'd say, Yeah, let's go with it. There would be a strange cropping or one girl in focus and three out or a blur. But I would end up liking the mistakes and incorporating them into my work. And I became known for it. ~ Deborah Turbeville

I don't create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art. ~ Chase Jarvis

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance. ~ Jerry Saltz

Our memories are convenient lies we create, cribbing images from others' experiences. We discard the personal specifics which don't conform to the ideal conventional beauty created by art directors and cinematographers. ~ Damian Loeb

When I was a young stunt guy the director would say: "You're useless ... " But I wanted to be the best, I wanted to be a super stunt guy. That's how I built myself, because of martial arts and everything. ~ Jackie Chan

In the eighties, I was fortunate to be one of the young art directors that Jerry Roach, creative director at JWT New York, took under his wing. He taught me how to use typography more visually, to push against design norms and not to rely on preconceived notions of what something should look like. I learned that nuance is everything and to agonize over the details. I have Jerry to thank for driving plenty of people crazy over the years! ~ John Butler

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do. ~ Wes Craven

I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. ~ Federico Fellini

To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors. ~ Henry Jackman

I've worked with more than 50 directors and I've paid attention since day one. That's pretty much been my education, apart from studying art history and shooting with my own cameras. I've seen 50 different sets of mistakes and 50 different ways of achieving. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power. ~ Luis Gonzalez

I have very talented art directors in my agency who start out telling me, 'Well, this is what the picture is ... ' I ask, 'Well, what's the headline?' and they say, 'We haven't done that yet, but it looks this way.' But I'm still writing copy, almost every day. ~ Jerry Della Femina

My favorite thing about this business is you're just jammed in a room on a set with like-minded people - writers, directors, and art designers and hairdressers. People who didn't work a 9-to-5 but chose this life. You're going to like at least two or three people in that you love these people so much. ~ Kaitlin Doubleday

If you, my fellow copywriters or art directors, want to win the award, devote your genius to making the cash register ring. ~ David Ogilvy

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters. ~ Marc Jacobs

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images. ~ David Lynch

In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches. ~ O. Henry

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. ~ Neil Postman

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that. ~ Olafur Eliasson

When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there. ~ Diane Paulus

I have worked with several art directors and production designers who are just magnificent. Dave Getz, Paul Felix, Ian Gooding ... just amazing artists, and I would say, if I had anything to do with it, I just pick good artists! ~ Roy Conli

It's a collaborative art form where we can both learn something from the other. That's what you want from the relationship with a director. ~ Cam Gigandet

I graduated from high school with the art award and I had made a ton of short films, but it was before DVDs with director commentary. ~ Kevin Munroe

Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature. ~ Michael Fassbender

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes. ~ John Ford

For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is. ~ Mick Garris

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. ~ Jason Blum

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

It was really executed well, from the art direction to the wardrobe to everyone else. And I have to say, two really exceptional directors who did three each. Roxann [Dawson] did the first three and Jeremy [Webb] did the second three. And I think they really were very meticulous in getting the right tone because it is both. It isn't dour and it isn't grim, but it's not a romp either. It's truthful and it has room for both of those things. ~ Gary Cole

Art directors speak in pictures. If you want an art director to understand what you're saying, you need to draw some lines and circles on a piece of paper. ~ Nevada Scheffler

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

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. ~ Helmut Newton

I enjoy talking to people about what I do - about films, music, directors, and art. It's very strange, having to talk about yourself. ~ Stephanie Sigman

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer. ~ Joe McNally

Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments. ~ Jason Reitman

It's an extreme to go from an artist like myself to a commercial artist with art directors looking over your shoulder, or any other knucklehead telling you what your art should look like. ~ Raymond Pettibon

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me. ~ Clint Eastwood

Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set. ~ Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise. ~ Guy Pearce

Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work. ~ Ryan Kavanaugh