Directing Film Quotes

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski

Directing film is the hardest thing I have ever done. ~ Anton Corbijn

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room. ~ Orson Welles

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say ~ Michael Winner

It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't. ~ Guy Ritchie

The difference between directing film and directing television is so stark simply because TV is a living breathing organism already when you direct an episode. ~ Jon Hamm

The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013. ~ Steve Sabol

I love film, but it's bringing me away from music. Singing is what I'm probably most passionate about. ~ Mandy Moore

I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I'm not going to make a Haneke film. That's just not in my DNA. ~ Jason Reitman

I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films. ~ Nicolas Cage

I do my work to the best of my capacity. I don't pick a role looking at its length. I take up a film because I would like to see it. ~ Sonakshi Sinha

It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me. ~ Mike Nichols

President Obama, inciter-in-chief, regularly used violent rhetoric to gin up the Democrats: 'If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.' He supported the most violent, seditious movements of 21st-century America (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Muslim Brotherhood groups, to name a few), while directing the Department of Homeland Security to track 'right-wing extremists' - in other words, Americans like you and me. ~ Pamela Geller

The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can't polish what you haven't written.

Things that made for a normal life - like a daily routine that followed the sun - took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn't a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep.

He would often awake with a new idea - as if he'd merely been on a break and not unconscious - and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot's seat in a ship that could go anywhere. ~ Vincent H. O'Neil

Think about trailers you see in theaters. If you're seeing a Warner Bros film, the studio might have three of the five trailers. So having a hit helps you create the next hit. ~ Anita Elberse

As you get older naked stuff [on film] gets easier. It's more to do with the role than what men in the audience think. There's a liberation about it. ~ Helen Mirren

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous. ~ Edwin Land

I met John when I was 18 and I was in my first John Waters film when I was 19. ~ Mink Stole

We leave Scarlet Witch without a home, without a family, and she ends up creating a surrogate family within the Avengers and making a decision to be a part of the team. I think a lot of that has to do with what Jeremy's character - like his attitude towards her and the speech he gives her at the end of the film. So we pick up with her having started a new life, but still trying to figure out what her abilities are and if using them causes greater good or greater damage. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable. ~ Godfrey Reggio

Well, everything is constantly evolving and changing. That's what life is all about. But basically Hollywood has lost its focus as a film center. Films are now made all over the world. ~ Kenneth Anger

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer. ~ Mary Harron

I think that there's no doubt that to work in film is a bit more of a creative journey. It's not that I don't put the same time or heart into something that's on television. ~ William Fichtner

You look for those actors or actresses that fit the personality to populate the film. ~ Yuen Woo-ping

To do a studio film, something with Disney. My father is thrilled. ~ Sam Riley

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way. ~ Matthew Pearl

I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a movie, that you had an emotional reaction. In order to do that, I felt that I had to really keep myself emotionally raw while working on the film. I had to feel myself crying, so the audience could be moved, too. ~ Tamra Davis

My favorite movie of all time is probably 'The Thing Called Love.' It's a formulaic film but it's got River Phoenix, who is like a god to me. I could watch that once a week. ~ Shiloh Fernandez

It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way. ~ Kevin Spacey

Going out at night and having a fabulous social life takes a lot out of you, and I don't know if I have that much to give, honestly. I would rather give that time to my kids or spend that time reading a book or watching a film. I am selfish and lazy. ~ Kajol

Hood films now are made by studios and have nothing to do with the reality they supposedly represent. ~ Mathieu Kassovitz

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film. ~ Frank Darabont

I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' because it's got to be my eye. ~ James Cromwell

I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. I never know where the story will go but I just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

I've always really wanted to make a film on what it means to be white in a country that's getting less and less white. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting. ~ Jackie Chan