Film Directing Quotes

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.

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.

I directed three films and each time [I act] I hope it's the last time so I have time to do my film [directing].

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

Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

The dynamics of film directing and fashion design - in the ways that I've done it - were not dissimilar.

Drumming is like film directing. You build a framework for everyone to create something together.

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.

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

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

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

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.

You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

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.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

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

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

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.