Filmmaker Quotes

#1. No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

Frank Capra

#2. And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.

Josh Radnor

#3. I've had a lot of fun watching my husband's wonderful career as a filmmaker unfold and all the interesting places we've been and people we've met. It's just been a really enjoyable ride.

Susanna Hoffs

#4. If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

Peter Greenaway

#5. The idea of an animated film is you always kind of get a little bit daunted by it as a filmmaker because it feels like a lot of your communication is going to be with computer artists, and you're going to have to kind of channel the movie through extra pairs of hands.

Peter Jackson

#6. The main reason why I'm a documentary filmmaker is the power of the medium. The most powerful films I've seen have been documentaries. Of course, there are some narrative films that I could never forget, but there are more documentaries that have had that impact on me.

Richard Ray Perez

#7. I'm not the kind of filmmaker who's going to go from one thing to the next. I often wish I was that filmmaker, but I'm just not.

Jonathan Glazer

#8. All any filmmaker can do is focus on creating something that has depth and resonance, and then do whatever possible to get it seen by audiences and hope the word spreads.

Megan Griffiths

#9. To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.

Doug Liman

#10. I keep trying to train myself to stop saying 'filmmaker' and start saying 'storyteller.' We're telling stories.

Christine Vachon

#11. Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.

John Waters

#12. Box office is one of the strongest tools we have toward preserving our ability to make our movies. We really can make a difference by purchasing a ticket each opening weekend to a movie made by a woman, even if you don't like the movie or the filmmaker and even if you don't see the film.

Allison Anders

#13. As a filmmaker, you are constantly having the discussion with your team about whether something is "relatable".

Chris Milk

#14. I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.

Jodie Foster

#15. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

Pamela Yates

#16. You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Matthew McConaughey

#17. The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

Bruno Dumont

#18. I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn't even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn't going to a lot of comedy.

Bill Hader

#19. Ultimately, I am very filmmaker oriented, as a producer.

Nina Jacobson

#20. I'm a filmmaker. I'm always searching for the truth in everything I do. I demand it from my writing partner and my crew, actors, and so hopefully, we're making people think.

Lee Daniels

#21. When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.

Walter Dean Myers

#22. It takes years of building that experience as a filmmaker, as well as physically. You have to have a high level understanding of martial arts.

Donnie Yen

#23. For me becoming a filmmaker was about taking back my voice - crafting stories that would move away from the problematic narratives that the studio system would put out about Latinos. I think this is why people like my films. They're refreshing. They feel more real.

Aurora Guerrero

#24. I'm an independent filmmaker with complete creative control of my films. I hire who I want. I have final cut. But at the same time, I go directly to Hollywood for financing and distribution. I find it's best for me to work within the Hollywood system.

Spike Lee

#25. Christopher Nolan's 'Batman Begins' set the bar very high for the superhero movie, as it showed that you could get a great cast for these movies and take a real filmmaker's perspective.

Jon Favreau

#26. As a filmmaker, I'm very collaborative. I don't pretend to know everything that is needed to make a movie. What I like to do is get together with a group of people, starting with developing the story and bounce around ideas.

John Lasseter

#27. As a filmmaker, I love the medium. I have a great affection for it and I've been lucky enough to do all different kinds of films. The greatest part of the success I've had comes from horror. I love the idea of mixing humor and horror and to me, it's all a giggle.

George A. Romero

#28. I want to do some bigger films, so long as there's some sort of exciting creative element or a good filmmaker behind them.

Paul Dano

#29. I am surely a feminist filmmaker, but not because I set out to become one, or am trying to make any kind of statement. Rather, it's inherent in the act of expressing myself, as a woman who is deeply alienated from mainstream cinematic structures of seeing. I express myself and am instantly feminist.

Nina Menkes

#30. I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.

Kevin Smith

#31. I read an interview with Mark Wahlberg, and he was like, 'I might read a script and love it, but it's all about the filmmaker.' I think that's a good lesson for me.

Shiloh Fernandez

#32. I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker.

Lee Daniels

#33. I decided to be a filmmaker when I was 12. I had utter clarity that this would be my life.

Tom Hooper

#34. As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.

Ridley Scott

#35. By the time you arrive at Sundance as a filmmaker, you've been living with your film intimiately, and scrutinized every frame, and probably aren't happy with - or at least I'm never happy with it - and you've seen it in the roughest of states, and you lose perspective, really.

James Ponsoldt

#36. I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.

Paul Haggis

#37. I am always on the go; being a photographer, filmmaker, author and a father, things become stressful, and it is important to find time to escape for a few minutes.

Nigel Barker

#38. I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.

Daniel Bruhl

#39. Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

Brooke Shields

#40. I don't need to prove that I'm some great international filmmaker. It's not really on my list of goals.

Dermot Mulroney

#41. Whenever a really passionate, talented filmmaker seems to have an interest in me, I take it very seriously because I like to work.

Ethan Hawke

#42. I love making films. I'm happiest when I'm doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing.

Ava DuVernay

#43. As a filmmaker you have to keep asking yourself the question are we really going to impress them [audience] either by the wow factor, the intelligence factor, the I didn't see that coming factor?

Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

#44. All I want is the same opportunities as the filmmakers I grew up admiring. But you know, I've had lots of amazing opportunities to do the movies I wanted to do. If I could write my future, I'd want to keep making character-based films that can make use of my voice as a filmmaker.

Tim Story

#45. Well, I think one of the reasons Chicago became so popular as a filmmaker location is because New York had been used so many times that Chicago, I think, was rediscovered maybe in the late '60s, early '70s for a long time as a new location.

Richard Roeper

#46. When you agree to work with a filmmaker, it's important that you accept their world. It's an adventure. I like that. I throw myself into the director's arms, into their universe.

Tahar Rahim

#47. I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.

Damien Chazelle

#48. As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I'm trapped in a genre that I love, but I'm trapped in it!

George A. Romero

#49. Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.

John Milius

#50. I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

Nicholas Meyer

#51. I have always admired him (Bergman), and I wish I could be an equally good filmmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience

Steven Spielberg

#52. It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics.

Alex Gibney

#53. I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.

Doug Liman

#54. As I became a filmmaker and realized that I had a voice, who better to speak for than kids that are bullied? It's such a place where you feel like nobody is listening and you can't communicate what's happening.

Lee Hirsch

#55. I would give female filmmakers the same advice I'd give any filmmaker; believe in your vision, believe in your team, believe in yourself.

Leanne Pooley

#56. Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer -
Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.

Manohla Dargis

#57. I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

Kirsten Dunst

#58. Why would anyone want to be famous, certainly not me. My only goal in an acting career is to be able to work full time as an actor, filmmaker. When I get to that level, which I will, in this business where I can spend one hundred percent of my time honing my craft, then I will be complete.

Tim Holmes

#59. Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read ... if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

Werner Herzog

#60. I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

Simon Beaufoy

#61. I believe in life. I know that life comes in at your heart and it doesn't matter if you're an actor, a filmmaker or a gentleman on the street, it comes at you. What Scientology gives me is the tools to deal with that, to better enjoy my life and to be able to contribute more.

Tom Cruise

#62. If you know the filmmaker is good and the leading actor is a movie star like Diane Lane, you know you're part of something great.

Kevin Connolly

#63. If there isn't a deep core reason for a film existing, what is the point? For me to be known as a filmmaker that makes films that have a point, I'm stoked.

Neill Blomkamp

#64. I like Spike Lee a lot. He's incredibly gifted and I don't think he gets the credit he deserves as a filmmaker.

Tim Robbins

#65. One of the things I've learned as a filmmaker is to have some aspect of the movie be something that I admire greatly, whether that's an actor I'm working with, the subject matter, or a book.

James Franco

#66. I love the studio system. Love that studio system and all their money. They're great; I think they're fabulous . You know, what it is right now is I feel like I'm still learning as a filmmaker, I'm still starting out.

Katie Aselton

#67. There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker.

Len Lye

#68. It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

Dakota Johnson

#69. At some point, you have an opportunity to not be a first-time filmmaker anymore. You can embrace the genre and show the world how you can tell stories on a bigger scale.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

#70. I loved working with him [Justin Chadwick]. He was very smart in how he assembled the people around him and had a crew that he knew very well. He was very comfortable on the set and I never felt that I was working with a first-time filmmaker.

Eric Bana

#71. I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#72. Ireland is a good place to start out as a filmmaker. If what you do is good, even at a very small scale, it will get recognized.

Lenny Abrahamson

#73. I was always interested in film, but I never knew how to go about becoming a filmmaker.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#74. An Oscar means a lot of things because it's like the ultimate award for a filmmaker so it feels great. But I think you have to consider awards with some distance and not get obsessed with it. When you're creating you shouldn't think about it.

Alejandro Amenabar

#75. I have yet to meet a filmmaker who upon seeing her footage for the first time, didn't want to simultaneously bust open a bottle of Champagne, and move to another country to take a job as a bike courier. This is normal.

Roberta Marie Munroe

#76. Lots of people have criticized my movies, but nobody has ever identified the real problem: I'm a sloppy filmmaker.

Francis Ford Coppola

#77. I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.

Joe Carnahan

#78. I don't necessarily see myself as an experienced filmmaker just because I've been in a few movies.

Joel Edgerton

#79. I don't think of myself as a director or writer. I think of myself as a filmmaker.

Conrad Hall

#80. I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

#81. Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.

Ava DuVernay

#82. There's some movies I watch, they're kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.

Mike Mills

#83. You can't second-guess yourself as a filmmaker.

Ralph Bakshi

#84. I probably shouldn't do a straight drama. I'd probably ruin it. I don't know. But, I'd love the opportunity to try. I'm sure that every kind of filmmaker feels that they can do other genres of film and want to, and I feel the same way.

Steve Pink

#85. I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.

Jonathan Nolan

#86. I always think shooting dance is a sort of test of a filmmaker.

Drew McWeeny

#87. With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Bruce Conner

#88. I'm not a fan of 3D. But I am a huge fan of digital imagery. Because it allows a filmmaker much more latitude to appreciate their own visions and dreams.

William Friedkin

#89. Quentin [Tarantino] is a filmmaker who really dives into things very seriously and deeply. And when he does interviews, he really wears his heart on his sleeve and he doesn't hold anything back.

Simon Kinberg

#90. I come from a family where my father is a filmmaker and professor of film.

Derek Magyar

#91. It is important to keep the filmmakers interested in you so they can offer you everything and anything. We actors are not given work on the basis of audience poll; the filmmaker will cast you after they see and like your work. It is essential to do different kind of films and not get typecast.

Randeep Hooda

#92. I have seen so few films in which the sex felt really respected by the filmmaker. Hollywood too often shies away from it or makes adolescent jokes about it ... Sex is only connected to the negative because people are scared of it.

John Cameron Mitchell

#93. Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

Abbas Kiarostami

#94. One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films.

Woody Allen

#95. I don't know of a more noble, a bigger deal as a filmmaker than to be a YouTube filmmaker.

Casey Neistat

#96. It's valuable to me as an artist and actor to explore all kinds of outlets. So if a local filmmaker in Milwaukee had a good story, I'd be part of it in a second.

Tanya Fischer

#97. My three Ps: passion, patience, perseverance. You have to do this if you've got to be a filmmaker.

Robert Wise

#98. I don't really pay attention to the filmmaker thing.

Jason Mewes

#99. I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient, I could be qualifying for, like, the lunch food job at my daughter's school.

Alton Brown

#100. I'm really interested in having a studio one day and being a filmmaker.

Ryan Phillippe