Hollywood Director Quotes

#1. I'm not a Hollywood director. I'm an in spite of Hollywood director.

Martin Scorsese

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

Doug Liman

#3. The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

Margaret Halsey

#4. Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.

Manny Farber

#5. I was told I was fat in the modeling world, and a director on a shoot told me I needed to lose weight. The J-Lo booty wasn't popular then, and I wanted to be the perfect Hollywood girl - tall, blonde and skinny. I couldn't do the 'tall' because I was 5'2, and I couldn't do the skinny, either.

Coco Austin

#6. The Hollywood model is to develop scripts for 10 years, sell them, transfer them, attach this actor, then attach a director. This isn't what I'm about. I'm much more of a creator and a doer.

Mike Birbiglia

#7. Every actor, every director, everybody needs an Oscar. You have to have that little statue in Hollywood, or else you're nothing!

Rita Hayworth

#8. I think I have been stereotyped as an action director in Hollywood, so all I got were the action scripts.

John Woo

#9. Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#10. When Shana Alexander interviewed me for Life magazine in 1952, she gave up after 4,000. At one time or another, I've worked for every studio in Hollywood, for almost every director with most of the actors and actresses.

David Sharp

#11. My dad's a lighting director. Growing up in Hollywood, I was around the entertainment industry all the time. I knew I'd end up in show business in some capacity, eventually.

Meghan Markle

#12. Overseas directors who want to work in Hollywood, the language barrier is not a problem. With the right talent, any director can be successful.

Kim Jee-woon

#13. I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

Jackie Chan

#14. Film buffs who don't live in Hollywood have a fantasy about what it's like to be a director. Movies and the people who make movies have such glamour associated with them. But the truth is, it's not like that. It's very different. It's hard work.

John Carpenter

#15. The action star's life is very short. Back in Asia, I can do whatever I want to do. I'm the producer, I'm the director, I can do so many things, but in Hollywood any time I present a script they say: "No, no, no, Rush Hour 3, Rush Hour 4."

Jackie Chan

#16. The first time I ever intersected with the quote unquote industry or Hollywood or being given a paid job as a director all came because of the reputation I got coming out of Sundance as a veteran Sundance filmmaker.

Lynn Shelton

#17. The only person who has artistic control is the director, and 'director' is how you spell God in Hollywood.

Tom Clancy

#18. Curiously enough, I was one of the first to have some say in Hollywood. By sheer accident, I had four successes in a row in the early 30's and, although I was still in my 20's, I demanded and received approval of cast, story and director. I don't know how I got away with it, but I did!

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

#19. When I drove up on the set one day, and they'd put up a sign that says 'The Bill Engvall Show,' I stood there for 20 minutes just staring at it. The director, James Widdoes, came up and said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'Look at this! There's my name on a stage door in Hollywood!'

Bill Engvall

#20. In looking at Hollywood and its structure, the director controls the medium, and I want to be in control of certain things. I want to be able to get my own ideas and my own feelings out there, and the only way to do that is to be behind the camera.

Jamie Foxx

#21. I always enjoy working with an international crew and director. But on the set of a Hollywood action film - now that's a whole other world. The sheer grand scale of the way things are done over there makes me envious; it's just so different from the way things are done in Japan.

Tadanobu Asano

#22. I am Hollywood's hottest young, middle-aged director, but I'll write out of New York because I don't want to become a salad head. That's what you become out there: a guacamole dip.

Michael O'Donoghue

#23. Well, I wasn't just kind of standing in a queue at McDonald's and someone sat down and said, 'You're the director of a $100 million Hollywood movie.' I've been working in commercials for ten years.

Rupert Sanders

#24. There's a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

Baz Luhrmann

#25. The problem with most Hollywood movies is they don't give the director enough control.

D. B. Sweeney

#26. A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

Douglas Sirk

#27. 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

#28. For John Woo, it is quite difficult to make a movie in Hollywood in his own style. Because Hollywood is based on a producer system, it is difficult for a director to express himself using his own style of filmmaking.

Alan Mak

#29. It has never ever been a bad thing in Hollywood to be sleeping with a director who's just won an Oscar or the hot new movie star whose face is on the cover of 'Time' magazine.

Kelly Rutherford

#30. In Korea, the director is on top, and the power flows down vertically. On the set, I love to come up with ideas on the spot. But in Hollywood, if I were to come up with a certain idea on set, the idea had to be taken to all these different people who had to agree.

Kim Jee-woon

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

Mike Leigh

#32. The good part of working in TV is it's like being a studio director in old Hollywood and approaching different genres. It's a chance to try out different styles.

Mary Harron

#33. My first in, my first break, was I met a director and got to talking with her, and she happened to be casting this movie that she had written. That was ten years ago. That got me to Hollywood. I got paid $700 bucks.

Chris Pratt

#34. 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

#35. For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood.

Berenice Bejo

#36. I've never had help from anyone, ever. I've never had this great director who saw themselves in me, because I'm a French woman in Hollywood. Who could identify with me as a successful director in Hollywood? Nobody. And the few people who could have been mentors, instead they just stole my ideas.

Julie Delpy

#37. You don't recognize the actor, because he's not from Hollywood's generic teen male pool; the director hat to go off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, to the little back stages to find this guy, olive-dusted skin, straight black hair, face that looks like he's never cracked a smile on his life.

Shukyou

#38. 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

#39. In Korea, the director has the final word. If the director makes a decision, that decision is final. In Hollywood, every decision needs to go through the producer, the studio, and sometimes even the main actor. There is a certain procedure that needs to be followed.

Kim Jee-woon

#40. The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually a press agent, actor, director, producer, leading man; and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude, but true.

Hedy Lamarr

#41. I'm meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It's more my problem than Hollywood's. I'm not attuned to Hollywood.

Henry Selick

#42. I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.

Leslie Caron

#43. In Hollywood there's no real material. They would send me stuff, but I hadn't even seen the director. If I don't see the director's eyes, I'm not going. I'm not even going to pack my bags.

Emmanuelle Beart

#44. One quality that a director needs to acquire in Hollywood is to understand the system and figure out how to work within the system to express one's own ideas.

Kim Jee-woon

#45. I thought that Hollywood was just for geniuses and that directors come from three generations of directors. I was worried that I was not up to the challenge of making a movie. Then realized that all a director has to do is know what he wants to do.

Fede Alvarez

#46. The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.

Steven Spielberg

#47. Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn't like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.

Daniel Handler