--Robert Altman
"As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it."
--Darren Aronofsky
"What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle. You have got to think fast in this business, you've got to keep reinventing yourself to stay on top."
--Michael Bay
"If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies."
--Kathryn Bigelow
"You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy."
--Peter Bogdanovich
"Art is a sense of magic."
--Stan Brakhage
"My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images."
--James Broughton
"Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who's very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real."
--Tim Burton
"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."
--James Cameron
'A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something."
--Frank Capra
" In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum."
--John Carpenter
"I use dancing to embellish, extend or enlarge upon an existing emotion."
--Gower Champion
"The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues."
--George Clooney
"We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality."
--Ethan Coen
" I do think that's so much a part of what being a director is - in working with actors - to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be."
--Bill Condon
" I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians."
--Francis Ford Coppola
"A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?"
--Wes Craven
"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."
--Cameron Crowe
" And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town."
--Frank Darabont
"Acting is by far and away the toughest job, in terms of film-making and maybe even the arts. How they do it I don't know, but they have to be allowed to get their satisfaction."
--Jonathan Demme
"First cuts are a bitch for a director, because it's been so many months and you put your trust in your editor and you're going to see your film assembled for the first time. You look at it and go, This is terrible. I hate it."
--Richard Donner
"Our feeling is that the most important thing on a set is that actors have enough confidence to try different things. If there's stress or tension, they won't go out on a limb because they won't want to embarrass themselves if they don't feel completely comfortable."
--Peter Farrelly
"There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch."
--David Fincher
"Casting is 65 percent of directing."
--John Frankenheimer
" I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior."
--William Friedkin
"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."
--Samuel Fuller
"It takes two years on the stage for an actor or an actress to learn how to speak correctly and to manage his voice properly, and it takes about ten years to master the subtle art of being able to hold one's audience."
--D. W. Griffith
"But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is."
--Taylor Hackford
"A theme that has always interested me is the difference between how thing appear and how they are. Image versus reality, etc."
--Curtis Hanson
" I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!"
--Howard Hawks
"People watch luck go by them, and they're so blind they never reach out and grab it.
--George Roy Hill
"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."
--Ron Howard
"Most of my characters are romantic rather than sexual. I think that's an essential difference in my pictures. I think they are more accurate in portraying young people as romantic - as wanting a relationship, an understanding with a member of the opposite sex more than just physical sex."
--John Hughes
"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it."
--John Huston
"I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas."
--Jim Jarmusch
"Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity."
--Chuck Jones
"Movies are art and the spirit of the movie depends on the creators."
--Lloyd Kaufman
"To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas."
--Philip Kaufman
"A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do."
--Elia Kazan
"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."
--Stanley Kubrick
"Everyone has a story."
--Neil LaBute
"A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there."
--Spike Lee
"All I try to do is create an atmosphere that seems comfortable enough, that it removes tension and everyone feels free. If they feel free then behaviour happens, small moments happen and that's what ultimately works the best for me."
--Barry Levinson
"I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with."
--Richard Linklater
"But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies."
--George Lucas
"For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident."
--Sidney Lumet
"I let the actors work out their ideas before shooting, then tell them what attitudes I want. If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb."
--David Lynch
"It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters."
