Top 100 Film Director Quotes
#2. 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
#3. The record producer is the music world's equivalent of a film director.
Phil Ramone
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.
Terry Gilliam
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It was only when I saw films in my early 20s by Jane Campion, Mira Nair, Sally Potter and Kathryn Bigelow, I started to think, 'Oh, it's possible.' I dared to suggest that I wanted to train to be a film director.
Sarah Gavron
#14. The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.
Anthony Browne
#15. I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.
Martin McDonagh
#17. I wasn't one of those kids who dreamed of writing novels when I was 8 or 12. I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to make big action movies. I loved movies like 'Die Hard,' 'Predator,' 'Aliens,' 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'
Matthew Reilly
#18. The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator.
Ken Loach
#19. To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.
Woody Allen
#20. I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.
Stanley Tucci
#21. I didn't even know what a film director was. To me, Charlie Chaplin was a goofy clown, and John Ford - what? Never heard of him.
Lloyd Kaufman
#22. I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director - you can do gardening or something - but I think everyone needs to create something.
Ricky Gervais
#23. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. And my own passion was that I wanted to be a film director. I realized that being an astronaut was not going to be an option, so I said, "Well, I'm going to be a director and do films in space."
Alfonso Cuaron
#24. The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being.
Sergei Eisenstein
#25. 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.
#26. A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.
Jean Renoir
#27. I really ought to try and make a film that's a bit more cynical. But I don't think I'd know how to do it. I think what it is, is that if you're a film director, you're basically there because you enjoy manipulating people's emotions.
Nigel Cole
#28. I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.
Abbas Kiarostami
#29. I would've been intrigued by being a film director. I would've been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture.
Charlie Rose
#30. In my career, I have played a gangster, an ex cop, a journalist and a film director. Yet, the label of a serial kisser refuses to leave me.
Emraan Hashmi
#31. I never wanted to be a film director but after this experience I really loved it. I would love to do more documentaries but it's difficult to find backing for them.
Marc Singer
#32. I think that in order to be a film director, one has to be a warrior who shouldn't be defeated by the daily onslaught of problems.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#33. My dad was a low budget film director. I grew up as a kid making movies, based on the love of seeing what my dad was doing.
Robert Stromberg
#34. I became a film director, but I wasn't successful with my first couple of films, so I had to turn to becoming a film critic to make a living.
Park Chan-wook
#35. As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace.
Lee Daniels
#36. Lucas George (Walton) (b.1944), American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He wrote and directed the science-fiction film Star Wars (1977),
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#37. I had become a film director because I thought I could express something in an artful way.
Paul Verhoeven
#38. You don't hear a film director saying 'Money mustn't go out of the industry' to actors. You don't hear a concert promoter saying 'We must make sure that money doesn't go out of our industry' to Elton John. Some people in football seem to think, 'Never mind the players, let's get on with the game.'
Gordon Taylor
#39. It's not that much of a difference. Basically, your job is the same as a film director. It's a triangle between creativity, money, and time. But they don't really change. You're ultimately trying to get the most creativity and time with the money that you have.
Darren Aronofsky
#40. You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.
Clint Eastwood
#41. I always felt more like a girl than a boy, I don't know. Music was very important to me, movies were not important. I was not dreaming of becoming a film director.
Lukas Moodysson
#42. I guess you could say I'm like a film director but my movies have only one frame.
Jeff Wall
#43. I didn't have the problem of finding myself at 45 on the wrong course - I always wanted to be a film director.
Elia Kazan
#44. As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking.
Stanley Tucci
#45. I was shooting a mini-series for Sundance/BBC, called 'Top of the Lake,' that was shot by Jane Campion, who's a beautiful native New Zealander and famous film director. The role I was playing was very intense, and they shaved half my hair off. So, I looked like this post-apocalyptic character.
Jay Ryan
#46. A good [film] director is talented, imaginative, and does his homework.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#47. I always thought it would be very funny if I was a blind film director.
Woody Allen
#48. I thought all I had to do was to buy a camera and become a film director. So when I left school I worked at a telephone company, which gave me the money to buy the basic equipment including the camera, the projector and the screen.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
#49. I think the two jobs I dreamed of doing as a teenager were comic book artist and record cover illustrator. Maybe film director was in the mix as well, but that seemed to be an impossible mountain to climb.
Dave McKean
#50. I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
John Waters
#51. A film director has to get a shot, no matter what he does. We're desperate people.
Elia Kazan
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. The film was semi-autobiographical. Director Mahesh Bhatt based it on his relationship with actress Parveen Babi.
Anupama Chopra
#62. 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
#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. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I didn't so much choose the film as director Claire Denis chose me.
Beatrice Dalle
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. If you do well as an actor, a good director will pick up on it, and keep it in the film.
Famke Janssen
#71. 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
#72. '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
#73. 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
#74. I'm an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.
Barry Sonnenfeld
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. '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
#79. 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
#80. The main problem is that the Hollywood system has already made the film before the director shoots a single frame.
Mike Leigh
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. '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
#84. 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
#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. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
