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Film Director quotes
Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.
—
Alfred Hitchcock
life
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
—
Woody Allen
ya
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
—
Jean Luc Godard
self
is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.
—
David Lynch
cat
Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
—
Pedro Almodovar
life
Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.
—
Robert Altman
life
My movies are not movies of answers but of questions.
—
Alejandro Amenabar
questions
There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.
—
Wes Anderson
time
The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.
—
Jean Jacques Annaud
art
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
—
Michelangelo Antonioni
body
I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you're following your passion.
—
Darren Aronofsky
life
There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.
—
Richard Attenborough
movies
Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.
—
Michael Bay
age
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
—
Ingmar Bergman
sin
For American filmmakers, the Oscars is like a mystic thing. For me, it was being in a mirror of my dreams when I was dreaming of Hollywood when I was an adolescent.
—
Bernardo Bertolucci
dreams
It's always the small people who change things. It's never the politicians or the big guys. I mean, who pulled down the Berlin wall? It was all the people in the streets. The specialists didn't have a clue the day before.
—
Luc Besson
change
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
women
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
—
Danny Boyle
growth
When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration.
—
Robert Bresson
inspiration
I took some time out for life.
—
James L. Brooks
life
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
—
Mel Brooks
age
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.
—
Luis Bunuel
you
One person's crazyness is another person's reality.
—
Tim Burton
reality
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
friends
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
—
Frank Capra
creativity
What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.
—
John Carpenter
power
You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.
—
Claude Chabrol
time
Mumbai's infectious. Once you start living in Mumbai, working in Mumbai, I don't think you can live anywhere else.
—
Yash Chopra
art
Honestly, as a director, at least for me, if I start doing the same thing over and over again, I'm going to get bored really quickly.
—
Chris Columbus
art
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
—
Francis Ford Coppola
people
Acting isn't for me. I don't like being told what to do. I'm more interested in set design, more visually driven.
—
Sofia Coppola
being
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
life
Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
—
David Cronenberg
life
Most people just half-watch TV. They watch TV while they are doing many other things in the environment of their home. So, what they are doing goes through their ears as much as through their eyes. In television, the narrative and characters are in the foreground of everything, because you are watching TV as you do other stuff.
—
Alfonso Cuaron
people
Looking for love is tricky business, like whipping a carousel horse.
—
George Cukor
love
The only things you regret are the things you don't do.
—
Michael Curtiz
regret
The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together, we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.
—
Frank Darabont
art
It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.
—
Cecil B. DeMille
law
A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.
—
Jonathan Demme
you
Nothing matters but the facts. Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game.
—
Blake Edwards
science
You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
—
Atom Egoyan
art
Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.
—
Sergei Eisenstein
men
There's a rule in Hollywood: stay away from water and stay away from snow, and I had both.
—
Roland Emmerich
water
The more real things get, the more like myths they become.
—
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
real
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
—
Federico Fellini
life
Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.
—
David Fincher
people
Revenge proves its own executioner.
—
John Ford
revenge
I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone.
—
Milos Forman
democracy
Style is something that's extremely important, but it must grow naturally out of who and what you are and what the material calls for. It cannot be superimposed.
—
William Friedkin
you
The more light hearted I write about that, the better the message gets through.
—
Theo Van Gogh
art
I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
—
Peter Greenaway
art
Actors should never be important. Only directors should have power and place.
—
D. W. Griffith
power
A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.
—
Howard Hawks
good
I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling.
—
Michel Hazanavicius
love
Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
—
Jim Henson
you
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
—
Werner Herzog
darkness
I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.
—
Tom Hooper
self
I dont dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for a living.
—
Steven Spielberg
dream
A nerd will be a nerd all his life.
—
John Hughes
life
I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.
—
John Huston
dead
The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
—
Peter Jackson
self
Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I dont understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didnt understand what they were talking about.
—
Jim Jarmusch
friends
Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.
—
Elia Kazan
mystery
Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You dont feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.
—
Abbas Kiarostami
change
For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.
—
Krzysztof Kieslowski
love
Humour is like violence. They both come to you unexpectedly, and the more unpredictable they both are, the better it gets.
—
Takeshi Kitano
violence
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, whats behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
—
Stanley Kubrick
music
Man is a genius when he is dreaming.
—
Akira Kurosawa
dream
The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I dont understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and its never the same as written.
—
Emir Kusturica
art
For me, cinema is a vice. I love it intimately.
—
Fritz Lang
love
I rather like mysteries. But I do dislike muddles.
—
David Lean
Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done.
—
Ang Lee
time
Fight the power that be. Fight the power.
—
Spike Lee
power
I cant see America any other way than with a Europeans eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.
—
Sergio Leone
time
You simply have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Put blinders on and plow right ahead.
—
George Lucas
right
All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.
—
Sidney Lumet
work
When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesnt make them laughable; its something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach whats most personal about them they could only come up with whats most public.
—
Terrence Malick
people
Miami is one of these great places that is a really sensual, physically beautiful place.
—
Michael Mann
beautiful
Thank God I dont live in Los Angeles. I think if youre there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.
—
Sam Mendes
time
The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.
—
Anthony Minghella
time
I always have coffee without sugar, you know. Just cream.
—
Vincente Minnelli
you
I am an animator. I feel like Im the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. Im rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.
—
Hayao Miyazaki
work
You cant regulate child labor. You cant regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong.
—
Michael Moore
slavery
My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mothers necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.
—
Mike Nichols
world
For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. Hes not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: hes a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.
—
Christopher Nolan
god
And I always had this idea for making a movie about a femme fatale, because I like these characters. Theyre a lot of fun, theyre sexy, theyre manipulative, theyre dangerous.
—
Brian De Palma
sex
Period recreation is very difficult unless you make a black-and-white movie.
—
Alan Parker
creation
Saying goodbye doesnt mean anything. Its the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.
—
Trey Parker
time
Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.
—
Pier Paolo Pasolini
life
The end of a picture is always an end of a life.
—
Sam Peckinpah
life
A lot of directors in television have come up through the technical ranks. They have all the technical skills in the world. Theyre not all that familiar with actors.
—
Arthur Penn
world
We like Batman - we understand him, we suffer with him. On the other hand, we want to be Superman. But theyre conflicting philosophies. Lets bring them together in one movie and see how we, as an audience, wrestle with our inner demons.
—
Wolfgang Petersen
man
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
—
Roman Polanski
you
For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I dont know that George Washington would be a president today, I dont know that Abe Lincoln would, I dont know that Roosevelt would.
—
Sydney Pollack
man
What counts isnt the frame, its what you put in it.
—
Otto Preminger
you
I like something where I can really use my imagination and be an active participant in the construction of the monster and usually thats in the world of the supernatural or the world of the fantastic, so thats why those kinds of stories about demons and the supernatural appeal to me or maybe Im really interested in that subject.
—
Sam Raimi
art
The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.
—
Satyajit Ray
person
The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldnt be in flashback.
—
Alain Resnais
past
I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.
—
Leni Riefenstahl
living
Im not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.
—
Guy Ritchie
art
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