Film Directors Quotes

I thought all I had to do was to buy a camera and become a film director. So when I left school I worked at a telephone company, which gave me the money to buy the basic equipment including the camera, the projector and the screen.

I guess you could say I'm like a film director but my movies have only one frame.

I've never wanted to be a fireman, in my life. I've never really wanted to grow up and be anything other than a film director.

My tutor was a film director on the side, and she introduced me to film. She then put me in one of her short films, and it came out of that. That's when I fell in love with the process of making a film. After that, I was about 15 and I was like, "This is what I've gotta do." So, I started taking acting lessons, and then I applied to college to do acting. I got an agent, and it all just happened.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

People have forgotten how to tell a story.

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.

A film director has to get a shot, no matter what he does. We're desperate people.

I don't ever like to feel myself in the position to demand of an actor that they trust I'm going to do something worthwhile. I feel a responsibility to articulate what it is I'm going to do. Whether that's showing them a full script or sitting down with them and describing my ideas in detail. It's a very healthy burden on me as a film director to be able to articulate what I want to do, to inspire actors, rather than just saying, take it on trust I'll be able to do something worthwhile.

The vast majority of people support the idea of an enlightened, modern union of countries demonstrating solidarity. Film director Wim Wenders recently summed up the problem to me very well. He said the idea of Europe has become an administration, and now people think that the administration is the idea. But that doesn't mean we should give up on the idea - it means we should change the administration.

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.

I became a film director, but I wasn't successful with my first couple of films, so I had to turn to becoming a film critic to make a living.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.

I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.

In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn't matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of intellect...The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film... I've been trying to get there from the beginning. I'm somebody who doesn't know, somebody who's searching.

When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I'm writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I'm subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don't resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.

Favourite directors change, like favorite authors. I had a passion for Gide and Stein and Faulkner. But now they're no use to me anymore. I've assimilated them - so, enough, they are a closed chapter. This also applies to film directors.

I never want to make a film. I don't wake up in the morning going, 'Ooh, I'd really love to be on set making a film today'. I'm aware that other contemporary film directors perceive film-making as what they do, as what they have to do. But I would hope that I am more catholic in my tastes.

I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.

I always felt more like a girl than a boy, I don't know. Music was very important to me, movies were not important. I was not dreaming of becoming a film director.

I think the two jobs I dreamed of doing as a teenager were comic book artist and record cover illustrator. Maybe film director was in the mix as well, but that seemed to be an impossible mountain to climb.

This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.

Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

There's no such thing as "an auteurist filmmaker." Every film directors is an auteur. We only make films that we do because we cannot put on clothes that don't fit us.

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. And my own passion was that I wanted to be a film director. I realized that being an astronaut was not going to be an option, so I said, "Well, I'm going to be a director and do films in space."

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

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.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

I would've been intrigued by being a film director. I would've been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

I am sure I am one of 2000 film directors in the world that Tarantino admires.

I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.