Director Film Quotes

#1. Frankly speaking, it's only the script that matters to me the most. If I like the script, then I just commit to myself and go ahead with it. But I also look at the commitment and confidence of the director of the film because it's him who will shape the film.

Vidya Balan

#2. I love working with Scorsese. He's not only a brilliant director and is great working with actors, but he's also a walking human film encyclopedia. It's fun to talk about movies with him.

Steve Buscemi

#3. Film work can be very interesting, but it also can be awfully boring because who creates the film? The actors? No. It is the director. It's his piece of work.

Max Von Sydow

#4. I didn't know I was a good director, and I mean that sincerely. I had done a film a long time ago called 'Cold Around the Heart.' Nobody saw it, and it didn't turn out the way I wanted to.

John Ridley

#5. For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like how do I make this film. That's part of the pleasure and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#6. You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

M. Night Shyamalan

#7. You want the film to be critically successful - you certainly want the film to be financially successful so that you can ... well, because that's how movies like this are made, you know, they need to make money. But as a director, you can only make the movie that you want to make.

Joseph Kosinski

#8. I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.

Saffron Burrows

#9. The techniques of different directors are very different, and people have different ways of expressing ideas in film. I'm happiest when working with a director as I would be if I were an actor. I'm wanting to provide a really good performance.

Howard Shore

#10. Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#11. I don't want to be an editor! I don't want to direct; I'd be a horrible director. I don't want to write - I have a 'story by' credit on one film I did. And I don't want to edit at all.

Topher Grace

#12. The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

Pedro Almodovar

#13. I used to love Woody Allen but feel he's become a hack as a director. 'Bullets Over Broadway' is the only film of his I've enjoyed in the last 10 years.

Douglas Wood

#14. 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

#15. A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.

Jean Renoir

#16. As a painter you're responsible yourself, 100 percent. In film, you have the editor, the director, the other actors. It has the advantage of not being solitary.

Sylvia Kristel

#17. There are two parts of me. There's the really critical, film-nerd part of me that loves that, and then there's the part of me where I'm like, "I really didn't like that movie, but I want to work with that director because he loves actors."

Anton Yelchin

#18. When I made my first film, I didn't think of it as directing, so it wasn't like I set out to become a director.

Kathryn Bigelow

#19. It's a morality film, and it poses the question 'What would you do?' I took it very seriously, just as the director did in terms of atmosphere and lighting, and I was just trying to help that vision along.

Kevin Williamson

#20. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

Alfred Hitchcock

#21. Editing a film is always a question of time, and the director. I've worked with a lot of directors who don't mind my involvement. They appreciated it.

Richard Gere

#22. As a producer, the most important call you can get is on Saturday morning, when the Friday-night grosses come in. As a director, you want your film to be successful. But your outlook is a bit different. You become very conscious of the reviews.

Irwin Winkler

#23. It never crossed my mind to be a director, and I'll tell you why: because I'm a woman. It just didn't occur to me, but I knew I had to be in film.

Patricia Riggen

#24. When you're working on a film, it's almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You're photographing somebody else's world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what the film is about.

Mary Ellen Mark

#25. Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

Kevin M. Kruse

#26. 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

#27. When I am shooting, I am inside the theatre, when I am in the editing room, I am inside the theatre. I always try to feel what they will feel. I see a film, not as a director, but as the audience. If I am entertained, they will be, too.

Rohit Shetty

#28. I miss the comraderie of live television - the fact that you were on the set, you worked closely with the director and the cast, that I miss. But, no, I'm happy, I'm happy doing film.

Rod Serling

#29. I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.

Kim Cattrall

#30. You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don't want four takes that are identical.

Dolph Lundgren

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

Roman Polanski

#32. When I was nine years old I use to copy - not trace - the covers of the Donald Duck comics. Many years later I became a close friend of Jack Hannah, the director of the Donald Duck film shorts.

William Jackson

#33. My aunt put my cousins into a children's modelling agency, then my mum did it with us. Me and my sister got a few TV adverts, which was good pocket money. A director saw photos of me and asked me to do a short film.

Sullivan Stapleton

#34. I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.

Gene Wilder

#35. Even if I loved the script, the director has to be right because it's all about the filmmaker. It's their vision. They're the ones that go back into the editing room and reassemble the film.

Cameron Diaz

#36. I believe, as a producer/director, your duty is to create a beautiful horror film that really resonates.

Guillermo Del Toro

#37. I want to have a great director, and also a great producer and co-stars. And there should be a tight script. After all, regardless of how the film turns out, I must have fun doing the film!

Kajol

#38. As a director, I think it is important to keep a space between yourself and your film. It's like you are in the movie, but at the same time you are watching it from the outside.

Tony Jaa

#39. I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know ... But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.

Jet Li

#40. Film's hard when you don't have any relationship with the director at all and you just show up. Then you really are just a gun for hire.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#41. I go into a young film director's office these days and he says, 'Hey man, I know who you are. I grew up watching 'McHale's Navy'. And I think, 'Oh boy, here we go again'.

Mako

#42. The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

Robert Olen Butler

#43. I'd love to do a Michel Gondry film. That would be ideal! I'd love to do an Almodovar film; you know, I think he's very, very talented. I don't care that people say he's pretentious. So what? He's a good director; he can be pretentious.

William Moseley

#44. As the cinematographer is usually more visual than the director is and full cooperation is really the answer and to make a great film, you need a good director and you need a good cinematographer.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#45. My greatest strength as an actor is that I follow my director's brief completely. The film is always the director's visual baby.

John Abraham

#46. Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.

Tony Visconti

#47. I was, and am, a frustrated filmmaker and film student, and my passion and love for movies was so broad that, in the earlier part of my career, I stumbled into doing 'Sports Night' and was a comedy director.

Alex Graves

#48. In my experience as a director, I think there is obviously something of the way men - maybe that's a common point with Shirin - the way men see women in the film, and the way these two characters see each other.

Abbas Kiarostami

#49. I like to be able to understand the feeling of the director, that a film corresponds to something in his life. Otherwise, it doesn't interest me much.

Louis Garrel

#50. One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers - anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.

Melissa Silverstein

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

Famke Janssen

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Phil Ramone

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

Beatrice Dalle

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. '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

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

Anupama Chopra

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

Lars Von Trier

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

Terry Gilliam

#78. It's hard to be surprised by a film. It's hard to be surprised by another actor or by a director when you've seen enough and been around. So when I am, or when I forget that I'm watching someone's movie, or when I don't know how someone made a certain turn that I didn't expect ... You know, I'm in.

Brad Pitt

#79. I've been shocked by film actors - 25 and under - having such confidence and cockiness to rewrite a scene. My background is more about the director being in control. It's all about yielding. It's an oddly submissive relationship in which you're moulded, Pygmalion-style.

Anne-Marie Duff

#80. For me, a director is a director immaterial of the gender. At the end of the day, the audience is only interested in watching a good film.

Boman Irani

#81. I have a very clear vision, and I come from film, where director is God, so if there's a clash, it's painful.

Lee Daniels

#82. In theater, you're in charge of your performance, and at the end of the day you're the one who gets credit because you're in front of the audience doing it, and in film and TV it's the director who gets to decide when to cut to you on a line, which take he uses.

Jonathan Groff

#83. I've never wanted to be a fireman, in my life. I've never really wanted to grow up and be anything other than a film director.

David Gordon Green

#84. My first time playing a main character was in 'Seventeen Years.' It was directed by famous Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan, but it wasn't a large commercial film.

Li Bingbing

#85. Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real ... an audience should not be conscious of technique.

David Lean

#86. 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

#87. '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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Mike Leigh

#92. 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

#93. '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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

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

Barry Sonnenfeld

#100. 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