Best Film Director Quotes

#1. 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.

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

Lars Von Trier

#3. 'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

Gurinder Chadha

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

Donnie Yen

#5. In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in 'The Social Network,' the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend's betrayal.

Richard Corliss

#6. I'm an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.

Barry Sonnenfeld

#7. An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.

Rod Serling

#8. Sometimes you see things in a script, and it doesn't necessarily mean the director sees the same things. And if you think you're going to be making a different film, then that's not gonna work.

Michael Sheen

#9. David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#10. The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Mike Nichols

#11. The writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

Hunter S. Thompson

#12. 'Room' is a very subtly-made film, and directing awards tend to go to the flashier stuff, but it's the Director's section of the academy that make the decision, so I'm very proud they can see something in what I directed and wanted to reward it.

Lenny Abrahamson

#13. Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#14. The main problem is that the Hollywood system has already made the film before the director shoots a single frame.

Mike Leigh

#15. I had to go and sing with the musical director of the film, Simon Lee, who is just incredible, and it went great. I sang with him about five things, things we'd worked on. And then I went to sing for Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Gerard Butler

#16. Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

Darren Aronofsky

#17. Being a film director involves, above all, a lot of hard work and resolve and determination. The glamour doesn't come until the premiere and the thing is all long done.

D.W. Griffith

#18. 'Slow West' is a film that I did with Michael Fassbender in New Zealand and Scotland. The director was John McLean. It's a film set in the 1800s. I play a young Scottish boy brought up in the royal family. I fall in love with someone who works on our land.

Kodi Smit-McPhee

#19. Oh, what the hell did I know? I went to the set the first day in full makeup and the director told me to take it off. So I did the film without makeup. I had nothing to do with anything I did. I never understood why I was so famous.

Ava Gardner

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Roman Polanski

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

Mara Wilson

#24. 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

#25. '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

#26. 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

#27. I love films. I love fiction films, too. I do. I love making them, but it has to be the right one. Hopefully, I'll never become a director for hire. It's horrible to make a film that you're not really interested in.

Oliver Stone

#28. When a filmmaker does not make films, it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail. The main question is: why should it be a crime to make a movie? A finished film, well, it can get banned but not the director.

Jafar Panahi

#29. My biggest role as director on the film is keeping a sense of the overview - how to cast the movie and shoot it in such a way that it will cut together. And how to design the style and tone.

Jay Roach

#30. When I got the script for Thelma & Louise, when I met with the director, Ridley Scott, I said, "I don't want to do a revenge film. I'm not interested in doing that moment in the script after they shoot the truck, where it says they jump up and down and they're real happy about it".

Susan Sarandon

#31. To have a director that loves his actors is something that you can see in the film and in the fruits of that labor. You can see that translated in the film. When you watch such movie, you can see a director who loves his actors, and it shines through the movie, in my eyes.

Vin Diesel

#32. I'm not a real film buff. Unfortunately, I don't have time. I just don't go. And I become very nervous when I go to a film because I worry so much about the director and it is hard for me to digest my popcorn.

David Lynch

#33. My film school is making movies. But, I do think that being an actor has served me immensely, as both a writer and director, in terms of knowing what is playable and what will be fun to play, for actors, and also how to communicate to actors on set, and not screw them up and get them in their head.

Josh Radnor

#34. What I like about being an actress is that it keeps you feminine. Being a director and producer makes you manly and very masculine and I don't like that quality in a woman. But I'll do it when the film is very close to me.

Bai Ling

#35. It's the reality: film is a director's medium, and, ultimately, they are the ones that are in charge, and you have to respect that because somebody has to be in charge. But, yeah, you do reach a point where you want to have your voice come out.

Dan Gilroy

#36. People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

Steve Martin

#37. An established film director can just pick up the phone and say to a star, 'Hey, are you interested in doing a commercial?'

Tony Scott

#38. The film was semi-autobiographical. Director Mahesh Bhatt based it on his relationship with actress Parveen Babi.

Anupama Chopra

#39. The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

Trevor Nunn

#40. If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

Brad Dourif

#41. When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

Marc Guggenheim

#42. 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

#43. As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.

Jeff Daniels

#44. I didn't so much choose the film as director Claire Denis chose me.

Beatrice Dalle

#45. The record producer is the music world's equivalent of a film director.

Phil Ramone

#46. I remember my very first audition for a film. I was in Seattle. They were taping the session, and I just went crazy. The director finally said, 'Zoe, what are you doing? The camera's right here. Just talk to me.' And it took that director saying that to me to change everything.

Zoe McLellan

#47. If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would listen to the director.

Mike Patton

#48. If you do well as an actor, a good director will pick up on it, and keep it in the film.

Famke Janssen

#49. It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.

Mary Harron

#50. I was thrown in the deep end at 18 when I got cast in a movie that I didn't audition for. The director just sort of found me and put me in a film, so the decision was really made for me.

Teresa Palmer