Best Director Quotes

#1. I would like Albert Brooks to have received the Oscars for best actor, best director and best screenplay for 'Modern Romance.' I love that movie.

Andy Kindler

#2. It's whether they have a vision and whether they're able to communicate it. The best director is just someone who gets over-excited about doing it - they don't even have to know much about camera or acting.

Colin Firth

#3. The lack of women directors is a sad fact of life. Kathryn Bigelow's thrilling Best Director win may help turn things around.

Lynda Obst

#4. In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

Bruce Dern

#5. The best director is the one you don't see.

Billy Wilder

#6. I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.

Joe Mantello

#7. Ang Lee's been nominated for Best Director for Life of Pi, which is what I'm going to call the six weeks after I take this dress off!

Amy Poehler

#8. I feel fortunate. I've really gotten to work with amazing talented people, and to learn from them, which is why I'm doing this. If I can work with the best director I'm going to do it.

Armie Hammer

#9. The audience has always been my best director.

Eartha Kitt

#10. If being an attractive woman got you attention for directing, then the entire 'best director' category would be comprised of models. To me, that is just the most ludicrous connection that you could make.

Diablo Cody

#11. Tarantino is the coolest damn guy; he's just so much fun to work with. He might be the best director I've ever worked with. He just seems to know how to do it and he knows how to make you feel good about it. He's having so much fun you start having fun. You can't help it.

David Carradine

#12. As a director, I do very few takes, because I feel like you hire the right actor and they'll do the job right. And the directors that I've worked with and had the best luck with - Jason and [ Steven] Soderbergh and the Coen brothers - all have been that kind of director.

George Clooney

#13. 'The Best Man' was my first feature film, and I didn't want to be known as a director who only does romantic comedies.

Melissa De Sousa

#14. I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

Adam Rapp

#15. I don't know, being able to work with Meth was pretty damn cool, but even that day, John, the director, gave me one of the best notes I've ever had. I walked into the scene just completely excited. I just couldn't believe I was going to work with Meth.

Josh Peck

#16. I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation, and if it's someone I respect and who respects me, even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best.

Robert De Niro

#17. In my mid-20s, I was directing episodes of 'Alfred Hitchcock' and 'Peter Gunn.' I was pretty much on course and - as I sometimes joke - was prepared to devote my life to become the second best film director in my family.

George Stevens Jr.

#18. I think every director has a different take, some are good, some are bad. The directors you get on best with sometimes don't make the best films, so who's to say who is right.

Tim Roth

#19. I do my best to hold the director's opinion above my own.

Jeff Bridges

#20. On set I keep myself to myself; I'd rather the director speak up. I'm not gonna direct a younger actor. I think the power of example works best, actually.

Gary Oldman

#21. If you understand the importance of developing a relationship with the director and making that director see that you're the best technical adviser and resource in the world on your subject, you'll be invited on set as a respected and integral part of the process.

John Fusco

#22. I was offered and accepted a part in 'A Few Best Men,' and then the Australian actor's union argued that there were too many British actors. And the director decided to lose me.

Noel Clarke

#23. Every time you start a movie is to explore with a director and if you can with the actors and with the other collaborators and try to figure out what's the best way to tell the specific story.

Emmanuel Lubezki

#24. One would hope that you would have a CBO director who does not let ideology get in the way of making good estimates, [Congress] values having a credible institution that they can rely on to give them the best estimates possible.

Alice Rivlin

#25. Casting directors I don't think are the best in Mexico at street casting. Whereas, I think, in New York and in L.A., that's more common; not so in Mexico. So it's up to you as a director in a lot of ways to go out and do that.

Cary Fukunaga

#26. A great difference between May and Day is the M and D! Be a good Managing Director of your life each day in May.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#27. I've learned from every director I've worked with. Everybody's style is very different, and I always say that being an actor is the best film school that I could ever go to.

Lake Bell

#28. I have an association that director means total authority. Director means they will never let you down. Director means just trust them and fulfill their vision, and know that the story will be told in its best incarnation.

Bryce Dallas Howard

#29. He was an amazing - John McTiernan really was an incredible director, probably the best I've worked with because he constantly busted me when he wasn't getting what he wanted.

Rene Russo

#30. I've learned over the years that the best way to develop as an artist is to make things. So I tell young artists it's not enough to be an actor anymore, you have to be a filmmaker/writer/director. There's no excuse for waiting around for a job. You have to be active and make things.

Liane Balaban

#31. Casting, to me, is always the same. It's a very important part of a director's job. I pick people that I sense I'd like to be in a room with and will enjoy the rehearsal process with because that's the best part.

Scott Ellis

#32. I love working with directors who have good taste. It's incredible when a director can say something and things open up for you. I went to The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and some of my best experiences on sets have been working with other alums.

Trieste Kelly Dunn

#33. Some of the screen's best moments were realized because a director went against all reason, all logic. No matter how incredible a story seems, it can be made credible. If you feel an insane idea strongly enough, you've usually got something.

Rouben Mamoulian

#34. I'm very jealous of actors that swoop in for 20 days, and then swoop back out. When you're a director, you're on that train for the next two years, so you best love it like you've never loved anything, ever.

Francesca Gregorini

#35. Movie-making is serious business. The director and the crew are already under a lot of pressure to give their best to the audience. Therefore, the best part for me as an actor is to act well in the movies and make a jolly atmosphere with the co-stars on the sets.

Abhishek Bachchan

#36. Lyrical lecture, word architecture,
Rap director, the best in my sector.
Microphone cool chief, releasin the smooth speech ...
I get nasty with a pen and some loose leaf.

Lord Finesse

#37. What you realize is that a lot of actors want to be directed. They're there to do the best job they can for the director. They have a lot of questions, and your job is to have answers.

Jon Turteltaub

#38. Although the Academy prefers their Best Pictures grounded in realism, not fantasy, Lee's 'Life of Pi' win proved that the voters understand and appreciate the qualities a visionary director needs to create an otherworldly adventure.

Richard Corliss

#39. I've always been a chameleon from book to book, like a director who does different films in the best possible way.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#40. I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate)," says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "I tell them, 'Do what's best for you. You're the one who has to live with it.

Mary Roach

#41. I got nominated for my second film as best young director in the Aikido Film Festival in Japan.

Donnie Yen

#42. You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.

Matthew Modine

#43. I worked with the best - Givenchy, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent - and it gave me an ability to be confident. It turned me into a CEO and a creative director and a brand.

Kimora Lee Simmons

#44. My job, as an actor, is to give the director options. You can only hope that the takes that you thought were the best were chosen. But, then again, if I don't watch it, I'll never know.

Johnny Depp

#45. There's no way a director can communicate with every single person on the set and yet they need to motivate and instill an ambition to want to do their best work.

Kathleen Kennedy

#46. I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work.

Walter Hill

#47. Be Your Best Without the Stress!Be the director and actor in your movie, called My Life.

Katrina Radke

#48. That's the best way to work on a project: talk to the director. In the end, it's the director's idea of how they perceive the movie and how they perceive the characters.

Stephanie Sigman

#49. There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.'

Stellan Skarsgard

#50. In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.

Steve Erickson

#51. Sometimes you don't need to explain how you care and love someone so much, but I really love him as a person and as a director. I wanted to be perfect for him [Michael Mann]. I wanted to give the best of my best of my best. I don't know if I did, but I was touched by him. He's totally inspirational.

Marion Cotillard

#52. In acting, you are fulfilled if you give justice to your role ... if you are able to do a credible performance and touch the audience. Same with directing. If you are able to draw out the best from your actors, then you fulfill your job as a director.

Timothy Hutton

#53. I produce the way I would love to be produced: In ways to create the best conditions to make your movie, but also to create a space in which the director calls the shots.

Alfonso Cuaron

#54. I actually love Scorsese comedies. He's an underrated comedy director. I think his comedies are some of the best comedies ever made.

Julie Delpy

#55. director of growth at StumbleUpon, put it best: growth hacking is more of a mindset than a tool kit.

Ryan Holiday

#56. Some people work very closely with a director or a producer on something, and from the get go, they're collaborating. But typically, it's just go in for an audition, do the best you can, and if the phone rings a couple of days after the audition and you get the part, that's great.

Roger Craig Smith

#57. If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.

David Henry Hwang

#58. Of course you want to be good and you want to do the best you can, but I am inspired by great writing. If there's something about the script, that's what I go for, although I know that that doesn't always translate because sometimes it's about the vision of the director.

Sally Hawkins

#59. One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.

Kevin Spacey

#60. 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

#61. I want to do literally everything. I think I was gifted ... I inherited one of the best comedy visionaries as a director.

Marlon Wayans

#62. The best thing about switching from being an actor to being a director is that you don't have to shave or hold your stomach in anymore.

Dick Powell

#63. 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

#64. manage the community outside of the CIA. An official observed, "The CIA director managed the CIA; it was the best job in the world. Managing the IC meant going out to the NRO and sitting through a three-hour meeting about satellite specifications. So it just was not done well."3

Michael Allen

#65. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

Steve Erickson

#66. While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community.

Burton Richter

#67. I am the best film director in the world.

Lars Von Trier

#68. My Mom is a ballet director, so I had this idea in me that classical training is the best foundation for anything you do, so I wanted to get a classical background and voice.

Shuler Hensley

#69. Every time I work with a European director, I find they hire the person that captures the spirit of the role. Americans tend to hire the best face. The person that looks more like the role, whether they can perform the role or not is a bonus.

Elizabeth Pena

#70. He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.

Tim Weiner

#71. I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

Michael Emerson

#72. I was too dumb to know Opie was going to grow up to be a great Director, if so, boy, I would certainly have become his best friend.

George Lindsey

#73. The best times I had on film sets were the times the director let me express myself, but those were rare.

Mara Wilson

#74. One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.

Tom Skerritt

#75. You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you're trying to do. A lot of it, when you're casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.

Scott Rudin

#76. The best films are because of nobody but the director.

Roman Polanski

#77. For something to be profitable doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing in the world for the director. You judge a movie by different standards - I've worked on comedies, and now I've worked on superhero movies, and the reviews are almost parenthetical in both of those genres.

Jon Favreau

#78. It's a writer's or director's role to be cerebral, whereas for an actor it should be a visceral, gut thing. When the action starts, it's best to turn the brain off and let it become an instinctual thing.

Natalie Dormer

#79. Every actor you work with has a different method, same with the director. You have to figure out what your shared language is and how to best support each other, and also take care of yourself.

Kerry Washington

#80. 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

#81. I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.

Dan Stevens

#82. I think the best work of the director is to listen to what all the technicians around him have to say, but then the thing is to take the best decision, what you think is the best. Then, that is the moment where you have to have all the film in your head and imagine how all of that will fit together.

Marjane Satrapi

#83. The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.

Stanley Kubrick

#84. I was focused on The Hunger Games movie with my director, with the studio, and with the cast and crew. We all just focused on making the best possible movie we could, and earning the right to do more.

Nina Jacobson

#85. My favorite parts of work as an actor and a director are those unplanned mistakes that do happen, because it's like catching lightning in a bottle. It's the best part of what we do.

David Duchovny

#86. A director on a film really sets the tone of how people go about things, so everybody is happy to be at work and everybody does their best.

James Franco

#87. As a designer, design director or any creative person, you have to hire great people, support them and make them feel comfortable so they can contribute and give you their best.

Tom Ford

#88. I always felt, and still feel, one of my best strengths as a director is having been an actor for a long time. Nobody knows actors and their insecurities and strengths and everything more than somebody who's done it before.

Paul Feig

#89. Earlier in my career, I needed to be the writer, casting director, set designer, leading man, and producer. I've been eliminating a lot of those jobs. I'm an executive producer right now. I still get to pick the best screenplays.

Danny Meyer