Art Director Quotes

#1. In a lot of cases, you think that the art director and the production designer designed and built this amazing set, when in fact they only built part of it and were able to extend it using all of this fabulous technology.

Rick Heinrichs

#2. I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.

Helmut Newton

#3. I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.

Jeffrey Zeldman

#4. Usually, an author writes a manuscript that is handed in to the editor. The editor will then work with an art director to find just the right illustrator for the job, and off they go. Many times, the illustrator and author never meet.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#5. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or art director says.
Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.

Chuck Palahniuk

#6. My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young - dub and garage would be banging through my house.

King Krule

#7. A lot of times there were big mistakes, but I would show the art director and he'd say, Yeah, let's go with it. There would be a strange cropping or one girl in focus and three out or a blur. But I would end up liking the mistakes and incorporating them into my work. And I became known for it.

Deborah Turbeville

#8. Art directors speak in pictures. If you want an art director to understand what you're saying, you need to draw some lines and circles on a piece of paper.

Nevada Scheffler

#9. I was the executive editor on a little magazine called Greek Accent, whose only claim to fame is that its art director went on to be the art director of Discover for many years.

Jane Haddam

#10. Michael's Powell art director was a painter and they had a wonderful friendship and artistic understanding. Michael himself, in the way he designed his own house, it was always with bright colours. Very un-English!

Thelma Schoonmaker

#11. I have been an art director, a book designer, a book-jacket designer and an interior designer.

Milton Glaser

#12. I'm not an art director; I'm just not. I've always been somebody who has a sensibility that I hope is the same sensibility of others.

Frank Oz

#13. My wife Victoria Harwood was art director on 'Far North,' and she had designed my student film, 'The Sheep Thief.'

Asif Kapadia

#14. When I do a still picture, I'm doing it all by myself with no help. I'm designing everything. I am my own art director. I'm doing everything. I'm directing, editing, whatever.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#15. Nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Chuck Palahniuk

#16. John Parsons, the gay art director at 'Vogue,' really started my career.

David Bailey

#17. I have an architecture degree; that's what my college degree is in. And that sucked. I started doing Web and CD-ROM development really early on, and then that grew into being an art director and doing advertising work.

Jonathan Hickman

#18. It is only the untalented director who imagines him or herself in every part, wants his or her own thoughts and emotions portrayed; it is only the untalented who make their own limitations those of the actors as well.

Liv Ullmann

#19. To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.

Luis Gonzalez

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

Billy Wilder

#21. What the computer can do in art and design has turned aesthetics on its head ... with the computer, things are not so much created as they are produced, with the producer-director becoming the star and the controlling force of much that was in other hands at other times.

Nicholas Von Hoffman

#22. I look at life as being cruise director on the Titanic. I may not get there, but I'm going first class.

Art Buchwald

#23. Ah, there's a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who's, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he's a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art.

Brian Cox

#24. I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director.

Arne Glimcher

#25. When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.

Diane Paulus

#26. It's a collaborative art form where we can both learn something from the other. That's what you want from the relationship with a director.

Cam Gigandet

#27. Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature.

Michael Fassbender

#28. I've learnt so much from every film and every director - a new perspective, a greater appreciation of the art.

Sally Menke

#29. No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.

Carol Burnett

#30. You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise.

Guy Pearce

#31. I want to try and be as involved in the art of filmmaking as possible. I feel that the only way to really do that is to take on as many roles as possible, whether it be as an actor, an editor, a director, a cinematographer.

Joe Swanberg

#32. Obviously in Art of Noise, I'm just part of the group, and when I do film scores, it's always in collaboration with the director and other people involved.

Anne Dudley

#33. Jimmy [Dean] was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work. He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble.

Dennis Hopper

#34. Filmmaking is not the work of the weak-minded. It may not be rocket science, but it requires ten times more strength of the mind than that.

Abhijit Naskar

#35. Josh Radnor is that rare thing: a writer-director who thinks like an actor but still knows how to create a comedy with shape and vision. Liberal Arts is the best movie about college I've seen since I don't know what ... Dryly affectionate and super-sharp. Elizabeth Olsen is every inch a star.

Owen Gleiberman

#36. For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is.

Mick Garris

#37. I graduated from high school with the art award and I had made a ton of short films, but it was before DVDs with director commentary.

Kevin Munroe

#38. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

Stewart Butterfield

#39. My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Yahoo Serious

#40. I knew ART was was going to give me this opportunity to expand my role as a director and finally let me have a seat at the table where I could get involved in these policy discussions and producing discussions and, frankly, the financial discussions.

Diane Paulus

#41. In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography.

Donnie Yen

#42. I know as a director I hit it out of the park sometimes, and sometimes we haven't, and that's kind of the way art goes. You just have to be willing to take the 'failures' and learn from them, make the best of them.

Tim Story

#43. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

James Franco

#44. As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

Robert Stromberg

#45. When I was a young stunt guy the director would say: "You're useless ... " But I wanted to be the best, I wanted to be a super stunt guy. That's how I built myself, because of martial arts and everything.

Jackie Chan

#46. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

Jean Douchet

#47. I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money.

Roger Corman

#48. I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

Olafur Eliasson