Top 100 Quotes About A Filmmaker
#1. When people see the conventions, they think they're going to get the straightforward genre - I don't give them that and they get mad. People see that and they think I don't understand the conventions because I'm not a good filmmaker.
Mary Harron
#2. As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.
Peter Landesman
#3. I knew that I always wanted to be a filmmaker, an actor, a writer and a director, that was always my plan.
Jaime King
#4. I'm proud of the way I rearrange and put things together, like a chef who makes a great meal, or a filmmaker who puts together a story - it's casting, editing, cinematography.
Bonnie Raitt
#5. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.
Werner Herzog
#6. When I was 20 years old, I had no plans to ever be a filmmaker.
Spike Jonze
#7. Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#8. I'd meet a new filmmaker that I'd always loved, and I'd think, "Great! I'm in the right place." It's a weird way to look at it, but I don't care as long as I'm able to make stuff that I want to make.
Amy Seimetz
#9. As a filmmaker, I make the films that I love, that are in my heart. That's what I care about.
Jose Padilha
#10. The world wants to define me by my mammary glands and melanin. It is just fascinating that Michael Mann has never been asked what it is like to be a white male filmmaker.
Victoria Mahoney
#11. I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.
Howard Shore
#12. You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.
Q-Tip
#13. There are consequences with age, so you have to evolve. I've loved becoming a filmmaker. But I would love to continue modeling, and there isn't really any job for me. It's being marginalized - that's the sad part.
Isabella Rossellini
#14. A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
Wesley Morris
#15. I'm a journalist, and I'm a filmmaker. I have an organization that's all about telling stories.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#16. I consider myself a completely lucky filmmaker. I've had nothing but good luck. Everything I've needed has come my way.
Woody Allen
#17. Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources.
Abhijit Naskar
#18. I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.
Anna Deavere Smith
#19. Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.
Peter Landesman
#20. To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#21. Gavin O'Connor, I'd walk into a fire for that guy. He's a brilliant filmmaker and a passionate man.
Joel Edgerton
#22. Most of all, I really wanted to become a filmmaker, and I've used every acting experience to just turn it into film school.
Jeremy Davies
#23. I do love making films. I want to be a filmmaker that grows and progresses and does keep trying to push myself. I think that's it ... and a bit of confidence maybe.
Dexter Fletcher
#24. You don't have to be musician to listen to music, and you don't have to be a filmmaker to go to the cinema, but somehow when we think of science, we think of it only as an academic discipline.
Dallas Campbell
#25. When I wanted to become a filmmaker, there was nobody for me to look up to.
Allison Anders
#26. When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!
Agnes Varda
#27. There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.
Bradley Cooper
#28. As people, my parents,were very colorful, very talkative, passionate, they really loved each other. But that also meant heated, it meant there was a lot of drama in the house. Which is good for a filmmaker, I think.
David O. Russell
#29. I don't call myself an 'independent filmmaker'. Either a concept works within a studio system or it doesn't. If it does then you should try to get a studio budget so that you can use all of the tools they have to get what you want. If it doesn't then you look elsewhere, or make it yourself.
Andrew Neel
#30. You've got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie's good enough, it's going to survive; and if it's not, well, it won't.
Sam Mendes
#31. As a filmmaker, you've got to have a nose for what's going on culturally. You have to feel it. It doesn't have to be manga or music, but you need some kind of antenna. That's very important.
Takashi Miike
#32. I'm not interested in selling out my career for a big paycheck. I would love to live a little more comfortably, but it is very important for me to try and maintain my soul and integrity as a filmmaker in as big of a way as possible.
Daryl Wein
#33. I'm not going to be labeled a black filmmaker. I am not here to just tell black stories. I'm here to tell all kinds of stories, musicals and dramas.
Lee Daniels
#34. The digital revolution has had a democratizing effect. Now anyone can be a filmmaker, but to be a good filmmaker is as hard as it ever was.
Pamela Yates
#35. If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.
Danny Boyle
#36. I'm a filmmaker and I'm proud of the movies I've made. But in the background of my life I was also very involved in the creation of the sport.
Joel Silver
#37. It's really interesting for me as a filmmaker to go back and look at the films I've made and see where I was at that point in my life and also where my ideals were and the beliefs that I had and look at the ways I've grown and evolved and apply that to the next thing.
Mark Webber
#38. I'm not a politician; I'm lucky to be a filmmaker and to be able to express myself through the films I make.
Mathieu Kassovitz
#39. I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.
Lucy Walker
#40. As a spectator, I have very eclectic taste, whether it's comedies or action or very small, intimate films. And I feel as a filmmaker I should be able to have that same eclectic taste.
Patrice Leconte
#41. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial.
Rebecca Miller
#42. I feel like people with their camera phones and Twitter and Facebook, this kind of question like, 'How can I be present and also document my presence or document what I'm doing?' is something that's always on my mind, even when I'm not working as a filmmaker.
Marshall Curry
#43. I never intended to become a commercial filmmaker in the first place. What I do requires time and experimentation. Commercial work is often not the best way to get the most innovative work, because it's about money and marketing. Although advertising is now embracing non-commercial people.
Marco Brambilla
#44. A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.
David Lynch
#45. I mean if politics was my main motivation I would be doing politics. But I'm a filmmaker.
Michael Moore
#46. In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
Jonas Mekas
#48. I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.
David Ayer
#49. The job of the writer and the filmmaker is not to impose his vision on the reality, but to be inspired by the reality and create a vision out of that.
Ramin Bahrani
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. You have these relationships with people that you care about, but I also try to stick to my job as filmmaker and be fair and truthful about what I saw and my experience of the people, hopefully informed by a deep understanding of them.
Lauren Greenfield
#56. I really took filmmaking very seriously ... It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I'm a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies.
John Singleton
#57. When I was a young filmmaker starting out, I was really snobby about all the affirmative action for women filmmakers because I felt it should be about your talent, and I made a film that won awards, and people wanted me.
Gillian Armstrong
#58. An unpopular apres-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his (Watt's) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute.
David Foster Wallace
#59. I've been involved with violent movies, and then I've also said at a certain point, 'I can't take it anymore. Please cut it.' You know, you've got to respect the filmmaker, and it's a really tough issue.
Harvey Weinstein
#60. You know, my dad wasn't a photographer or filmmaker by profession, but on Sundays, he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding, and it was a means of communication and affection, a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other.
Bruce Weber
#61. With docs, there's often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open.
Tom McCarthy
#62. As a filmmaker, I always try not to concern myself with the outcome of things. I make the movie, and I do that as honestly and good as I can. I don't want to pollute my thoughts with what is going to happen with it afterwards, because I have to work inside-out.
Susanne Bier
#63. Horror films are art, it's all make believe. It's great if a filmmaker can try to push boundaries and see how much an audience can take and see what happens. It's fun to be able to do that.
Tom Six
#64. I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.
Drew Goddard
#65. There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker.
Len Lye
#66. I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.
Doug Liman
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.
Pamela Yates
#75. If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
Peter Greenaway
#76. When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
Ken Burns
#77. I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
Jonathan Lethem
#78. I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.
Quentin Tarantino
#79. 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
#80. I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.
James Cameron
#81. It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often.
Robert Rodriguez
#82. For me, whether or not a film has some kind of massive budget or is an independent film, or however it's getting made, it's always about the filmmaker and, hopefully, being a vessel for the filmmaker's vision. That's what really attracts me to projects.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#83. I wanted people to know that I'm not just a guy who does weird videos on the Internet. I actually am a filmmaker, and I can tell stories, and I can create something that's 90 minutes long that feels just like any other movie you see in the theater, and hopefully enjoy.
Shane Dawson
#84. As a filmmaker, it's important to sit there and feel embarrassed. If you feel embarrassed by something, you cut it.
Andrew Dominik
#85. I'm a fetish filmmaker, in that I don't know why I do what I do, I just like to see things. When I figure out what I would like to see, I will put it in a film.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#86. I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself.
Catherine Hardwicke
#87. I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.
Lisa Cholodenko
#88. I'm not educated as a filmmaker, so it's quite a jump for me.
Anton Corbijn
#89. A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.
Orson Welles
#90. Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.
Ava DuVernay
#91. For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.
Channing Tatum
#92. I'm both an artist / filmmaker and a human rights defender.
Pamela Yates
#93. 'Coriolanus' has been around for 400 years, and it's going to be around for another 400 years, and nothing I can do is going to mess it up. So, going into it, I felt sort of very free to look at it as a filmmaker does.
John Logan
#94. The one thing I'm proud of as a filmmaker is that people are entitled not to like my films - that's the privilege of the public - but I think I have my own imprint.
McG
#95. For any filmmaker who has just released a film and who is experiencing some measure of success, the temptation can be great to respond to every screening request that comes in.
Julia Bacha
#96. If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.
Guy Maddin
#97. I'm a small filmmaker, making my small, low-budget movies, but I'm super lucky to know that everybody reacts differently to my movies. That's interesting.
Quentin Dupieux
#98. My dad made a film called 'Willow' when he was a young filmmaker, which screened at the Cannes film festival, and people were booing afterwards.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#99. Music is, for me, a great tool of a filmmaker, the same way cinematography, the acting, editing, post-production, the costumes are. You know, to help you tell a story.
Spike Lee
#100. Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
Susan Sontag
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