Motion Picture Directors Quotes

Our specialty was exasperated dignity and the discombombulation of Authority. ~ Mack Sennett

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands. ~ Timothy Noah

Life is like a motion picture, everything is like a movie. In one of my rhymes I say, "My life is like a movie/Directed by King Louie". ~ King Louie

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers. ~ John Wayne

I feel profoundly blessed. I feel it's a great privilege to make any motion picture. ~ David O. Russell

Let's be clear about one thing: a film about Katharine Hepburn is an excellent idea. She was one of the most fascinating, complex stars ever to grace a motion picture screen, and she deserves a full-scale, big-screen biographical treatment. ~ William J. Mann

SUMMARY In this chapter we have focused on three ways to analyze and solve communication problems - through component, transactional, and life-space analysis. Component analysis uses a "snapshot" approach to study the speaker, the message, and the listener. Transactional analysis takes a "motion picture" review of the way communication partners respond to each other (as an Adult, Parent, or Child). Life-space analysis takes a "panoramic" view of the environment or total situation which affects the way a person ~ Paul W. Swets

The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen. ~ King Vidor

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still. ~ Alfred Stieglitz

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator. ~ Laurence Olivier

'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. ~ Seth Shostak

Horace, however, had arrayed himself in a Gothic assortment of crushed velvet, black satin, and patent leather that shouldn't have been allowed in my view. He might as well have I AM A VAMPIRE embroidered across the front of his watered-silk waistcoat. An outfit like that is going to get him staked one of these days; it's exactly what Boris Karloff would have worn, if he had joined the cast of Rocky Horror Motion Picture Show. ~ Catherine Jinks

My main object in making a motion picture is entertainment. If at the same time I can strike a blow for liberty, then I'll stick one in. ~ John Wayne

The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer ... and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it. ~ Irving Thalberg

During the 1970s (and particularly because of Vietnam), it slowly became standard for absolutely everyone to go to college, particularly if they had no desire to get a real job. One of the results was a massive population of film school students, most of whom became waiters and valets in the 1980s. Since the vast majority of these Kubrick wannabes couldn't crack the motion picture industry, they saw opportunities to make minimovies in the world of rock 'n' roll. ~ Chuck Klosterman

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

There was much to put out of his mind. Why was it difficult to forget Chekov's astonished delight which greeted him at the command airlock when he boarded. And on the bridge - Kirk! The mere name made Spock groan inwardly as he remembered what it had cost him to turn away from that welcome. T'hy'la! ~ Gene Roddenberry

Lillian was determined that her next role would be Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and assumed she only needed to find the right actor to play opposite her as Reverend Dimmesdale. Mayer informed her there was a much larger issue at stake; The Scarlet Letter was on the Hays office "blacklist" of books that could not be filmed. The very idea of a blacklist was ridiculous to Lillian and she took up the matter directly with Will Hays. While he would occasionally publicly chastise the studios, Hays never forgot that the full name of his office was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and worked to smooth the path any and every way he could. He told Lillian that the major source of objection was "the Protestant Church, especially the Methodists," and directed her to the heads of several church and women's organizations where she forcefully presented her case. Even with Hays's assistance, no other actress had the personal and professional reputation pure enough to garner the response she received: the ban would be lifted if she was "personally responsible" for the film.

Lillian turned her attention to finding the consummate Dimmesdale and Mayer suggested she watch Lars Hanson in The Saga of Gosta Berling. The studio boss had seen Mauritz Stiller's film in Berlin the previous December and he immediately put the director and the film's three stars, Hanson, Mona Martenson, and Greta Gustafsson, all under contract. Lillian agreed ~ Cari Beauchamp

If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars! ~ Orson Welles

I never danced a step in my life so naturally. My first motion picture was a musical, and Bob Fosse was the choreographer. I didn't exactly dance for Fosse, I just did the best that I could to do what he taught us to do. ~ Dick York

A recent event hosted by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with film makers to discuss what both groups have learned
the scientists through painstaking experiments and analysis, and the film makers by intuition and experience
about the mechanisms of attention and perception. ~ Anonymous

So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise. ~ Garson Kanin

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?' ~ Zack Snyder

The thing about a motion picture is that look of film on a big screen takes you into a magical. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions. ~ King Vidor

I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you're in the world, then you enter the picture and you're in a different world (it's not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you're returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities. ~ Frank Gohlke

The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal. ~ John Gregory Dunne

Every Pixar movie at one time was the worst motion picture ever made. ~ John Lasseter

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

Fact is, awards shows were never really about recognizing achievement. They were a publicity ploy cooked up in the late 1920s by MGM topper Louie Mayer and his newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which was itself, back in the day, nothing but a front organization to discourage unionizing. ~ John Ridley

The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra. ~ Roland Joffe

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. ~ Raymond Chandler

I made my last motion picture in March 1965 for Magna Pictures. 'Harlow,' based on the life of actress Jean Harlow ... I didn't know at the time that 'Harlow' would be my last motion picture. ~ Ginger Rogers

Motion picture making is a very, very involved affair. It is completely my baby. I'm a thorough professional. I plan films right from the conception of an idea to its final execution. ~ Dev Anand

There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist. ~ Warren Farrell

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes. ~ Renata Adler

Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one. ~ William Goldman

But it was not in Mr. Gruber's nature to look for reasons. That was why he was an ideal secretary. He had been given much fancier assignments in the past. Find out by six in the evening whether Hubermann played any Tschaikovsky after the first intermission of his concert in Brussels last year. Produce a narwhal tusk at least five feet long by eight o'clock Thursday morning. Buy, in your own name, the Domino Motion Picture Theater in Zurich. On Wednesday afternoon between five and six in the Café Meteor in Budapest, slap the face of a character known as Ervin Kugyec. A good secretary does not look for reasons but gets results. ~ Lajos Zilahy

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic. ~ David Slade

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing. ~ Zane Grey

Being a motion picture actress is the pitch of ecstasy. ~ Norma Shearer

The Starship Enterprise is not a collection of motion picture sets or a model used in visual effects. It is a very real vehicle; one designed for storytelling. ~ Rick Sternbach

I would love to do a Broadway play. I would love to do big screen also, motion picture. ~ LaToya London

If life is envisioned as a continuously running motion picture, the keeping of a notebook stops the action and allows a meaningful scene to be explored frame by frame. ~ Jo Coudert