Movie Director Quotes

I will never become a director or a movie producer. I was always looking at picture directing because I didn't know what to do! You can't be a movie director without real preparation.

I want to get into the theater. I really wanted to be a theater director, but I turned out to be a movie director.

The only safe thing is to take a chance.

I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.

I steal from every movie ever made.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

I think its a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests, it’s not the other way around, that’s how I feel.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I think a lot of people have a vision of L.A. in which TV executives and movie directors plan their latest productions by the swimming pool.

I like to think of myself as a fairly educated human being, but I'm a very uneducated actor when it comes to movies, directors, producers, actors for that matter.

I love movie directors. I don't care who it is.

I never aspired to be a television producer and a movie director, and I'm shocked that this idea is still going on.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

I deal with guys in their 20s and early 30s who are presidents of companies, who are movie directors.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied... That's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.

When I was very young I wanted to be a professional horseback rider. Then I wanted to be a pop singer. Then I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Then I wanted to be a movie director.

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.

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.

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.

I've never seen a movie director who was happier to be directing a movie than Dave [Mamet]. His sets, everyone who's ever been involved with one of them will tell you of the funnest, funniest sets you can be on.

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

I'm a curious person. I pursue things based on what sparks my interest. I'm not thinking about what role I play. I don't have to be a movie director or this or that. I just want to be part of projects and places that are of interest to me.

A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there.

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

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.

And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

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

I had a caricature view of the guy in the beret with the big megaphone­­, but a movie director and writer was beyond my role of understanding.

There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

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

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting

In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

I'm like a movie director, so wherever I feel that I need to go over this type of beat, that's what I'm going to do, that's where I'm going to go.

People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.

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.

In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

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.