Top 100 Quotes About Film School
#1. In film, I don't think I'd try directing. Maybe one day, but I'd certainly want to go to film school or something before I tried to do something like that. That would be quite scary.
Amelia Warner
#2. 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
#4. I'll have a sentence in my head that's kind of beautiful and interesting, but I'm not sure why or where it's coming from. So it's kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it's the exact opposite of my film school experience.
Don Hertzfeldt
#6. I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.
Geoffrey S. Fletcher
#7. I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."
Bryan Fuller
#8. I just use all the skills that I learned in film school, and I just incorporate them into my sketches. People don't realize that, with a story, there has to be a beginning, middle and end. There has to be a problem and a resolution. Just because it's six seconds doesn't mean it's not a story.
King Bach
#9. All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory.
Terry Gilliam
#10. All the lessons you learn in film school from the people you hate are always the ones that are important. The lessons you think are great and thankful for never end up meaning anything to you.
Glenn Ficarra
#11. I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.
Jonathan Demme
#12. I really learned a lot when I worked on my grandpa's film 'Twixt' and got to be with him start to finish and sit next to him every day. That was my film school.
Gia Coppola
#13. I'd like to go to NYU business school and then go on to film school.
Alexa Vega
#15. I definitely think for up and coming filmmakers, people graduating from film school, people that want to do their own movies, horror movies are a great way to go.
Jonathan Levine
#16. I was happy when I got into film school. I'd simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in - nothing else - although I do believe they shouldn't have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can't understand why they took me. Probably because I'd tried three times.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#17. I always wanted to be a filmmaker and became one through sheer single-mindedness. I came to filmmaking from a background in graphic design. I went to film school at Newcastle Polytechnic.
Neil Marshall
#18. I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
Ava DuVernay
#19. I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."
George Lucas
#20. My M.F.A was in directing, and all the films I've made, for film school and after, I've written, directed and shot.
Geoffrey S. Fletcher
#21. I thought about going to NYU film school - that was this ideal to me. But I didn't make any kind of grades in high school.
Louis C.K.
#22. The public scrutiny element they don't teach you in film school. So few people are ever subjected to it.
Colin Trevorrow
#23. Knowing what I do now, I don't know if I'd ever have the balls to go to film school, with no connections and no knowledge of the business side at all.
Michael Patrick Jann
#24. When I was in Hungary in December I was looking at student films and I could not tell which ones were shot on film and which ones were shot digitally. I think that is because the filmmakers in Europe go to four years of film school and learn the techniques.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#25. I went to Bournemouth Film School for 3 years.
Joe Cornish
#26. I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
Robert Morgan
#27. It's the thing they don't teach you in film school - what happens after you finish your movie.
Leland Orser
#28. A lot of directors straight out of film school are very technically minded, but they don't have an understanding of actors or how to talk to them.
Peter Dinklage
#29. I went to film school to make films just because you're in control of the story.
Julie Delpy
#30. I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact.
Agnes Varda
#31. In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie," says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.
Peter Biskind
#32. Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don't relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater; you stay in control through the very end.
Mark Waters
#33. I actually went to film school, but I didn't like it. I'm basically self-taught.
Judah Friedlander
#34. I got interested in the justice system. If I was, I'd probably be a defense lawyer. I was headed that way, but luckily changed my track to film school.
Matthew McConaughey
#35. 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
#36. I wanted to stay in New York to pursue acting, but my dad urged me to get a four-year degree. Reading about the film school at Florida State University, he suggested I go there. I received my bachelor's degree in 2003.
Lauren Miller
#37. When I was in film school, I was learning more theory than practice.
Louis Leterrier
#38. We were studying at Newport Film School, and I found that the only way for me to make films - because you need people and you need equipment - was that I had to be a student.
Asif Kapadia
#39. While still a young student at film school, I was lucky enough to get a golden ticket to a Martin Scorsese master class at BAFTA in Piccadilly: fancy, but technically still 'the flicks'.
Asif Kapadia
#40. I went to film school and wanted to learn everything there was about making movies.
Zach Braff
#42. I spent a lot of time making music and touring around the country and living the weird life. I was just trying to keep a job and get by. So in a lot of ways, I went through a strange version of film school. So you live through a lot of things, and put them into your work.
Dito Montiel
#43. I wasn't the kind of kid like Spielberg or Lucas who knew to go to film school. I didn't know at 12 what I was going to do; it took me until I was about 23. I studied journalism in college, but after school, I got a job in public television and I never worked as a journalist for one moment.
Nancy Meyers
#44. I've made some great movies. 'Risky Business' still stands up. It's timeless. They study that film in film school.
Rebecca De Mornay
#45. I was out in L.A. and I had gone to film school and I was out here for a couple of years. For a lot of years, I was bartending and having a good time.
Justin Zackham
#46. There's a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#47. It was the beginning of film for television. So we had all of these great opportunities. Northwestern was probably the only major film school of its kind at the time that was graduating anybody important.
Richard Donner
#48. I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.
Ira Sachs
#49. As an actress, I never went to film school, and I think if I had gone to film school, I would have started with a great advantage. If you have a strong intent to do anything in life, you can do it, but it always helps to have formal training.
Preity Zinta
#50. When I met David Green at film school he always used to offer free haircuts - he was kind of an artisan. In a lot of our films, he's constantly trying to give me weird looks.
Danny McBride
#51. The informing idea of what you want to say and do, that's what will take you from film school to professional - the idea. That's what is original to you.
William Friedkin
#52. Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.
Haile Gerima
#54. You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
Werner Herzog
#55. I just decided to make a movie. I had no training, no film school, but I had been to a lot of movies.
Michael Moore
#56. Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.
Sean Penn
#57. I learned how to direct by being in the trenches of movies. Getting to be a student from the inside looking out, and if you're a respectful observer you can sponge lots of information. That was my film school.
Lake Bell
#58. I had been accepted to film school, but my parents couldn't afford it, and yet they made too much money for me to get a scholarship.
Ryan Murphy
#59. I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.
Mark Romanek
#60. There's a lot of dopes in life, and in film school. The interesting people are usually easy to find.
Tim Heidecker
#61. I've learned from every director I've worked with. Everybody's style is very different, and I always say that being an actor is the best film school that I could ever go to.
Lake Bell
#62. I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
Paul Haggis
#63. I think a lot of directors, they come out of film school, they don't know anything about acting. Or they're writers that don't know anything about the process. And I think they're afraid sometimes to talk to actors and be honest with actors.
Matt Dillon
#64. I like acting, but I like filmmaking better. I went to film school. I want to make films.
Art Alexakis
#65. I love films from all these different points of views that used the idea of the school as a way to talk about the American experience. It took me a while to figure how to write a movie like that, because that's not something you learn at film school
Justin Simien
#66. Sitting opposite Steven Spielberg, while he turns the pages of your script and talks about each scene as he goes, is about the best film school you can get.
Matt Charman
#67. I always wanted to direct movies. That's what I set out to do. When I was a little kid I just dreamed of making movies, and I went to film school.
Zach Braff
#68. My job as an actor has inspired generations of children to become doctors. My job as a writer has opened up the minds of millions. My job as a director has produced masterpieces that will be taught in film school for ages.
Zach Braff
#69. I attend film school, my background is acting and directing. But the acting does best, I like to work on the stage.
Tommy Wiseau
#70. After I did 'Orchids,' I enrolled back in film school and did a million and a half workshops and worked with great professors and people, trying to hopefully get better.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#71. I do tend to take time off. A year and a half ago I went to film school, and before that I had taken years off at a time to be involved politically or this or that.
Sarah Polley
#72. If I wasn't a trader, I would probably be in the film business in some capacity and writing in some other form. I went to NYU Film School and London Film School.
Jeff Cooper
#73. I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
Jonathan Levine
#74. My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she's at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn't think it would be fair; plus, they didn't have any interest anyway.
Howard Schultz
#75. NYU Film School was the way to learn about film, to be exposed to film, to go to repertory houses, to be exposed to New York and see films. I would go to the library and see one, two or three movies a day.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
#76. After film school, I would write 8 hours a day on film and 8 hours a night on TV, and then sleep once and a while.
Tobias Lindholm
#77. I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn't care what kind of movies I made.
George Lucas
#78. When I watch my early documentaries, they're very eclectic. They don't follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn't. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant.
Pawel Pawlikowski
#79. I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
Brian K. Vaughan
#80. 'Lord of the Rings' was going on; like, my college years were the years of 'Lord of the Rings,' an awesome time to be in film school.
Evan Daugherty
#81. When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.
James Franco
#82. Because I didn't go to film school, you learn so much from a lot of creative artists.
F. Gary Gray
#83. Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#84. Film school was a privilege I could not afford.
Ava DuVernay
#85. Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school - you're always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.
Peter Jackson
#86. I feel like a lot of my past career was going to film school, making a lot of different kinds of movies. I made a bunch of comedies, I made one drama and I made a couple musicals.
Adam Shankman
#87. To me film school was film history because there weren't a lot of books out there that I had access to.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
#88. Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#89. I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'
Wong Kar-Wai
#90. I was really affected by 'The Piano.' Had I not seen that movie, I wouldn't have gone to film school.
Paul Schneider
#91. I almost became a music major, but somehow I was so enthralled with the camera and becoming a director that I stuck with film school and theatrics.
James Brolin
#92. I just remember when I came out of film school - and I loved film school - that the industry was such a mystery. How to break in, and once you are in, how to make a film; that is such a large undertaking. There are thousands of pitfalls.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#93. When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour.
Lars Von Trier
#94. I actually went to film school and was making experimental films for a short time, so it wasn't such a leap.
Jim Coleman
#95. I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.
Tobias Lindholm
#96. I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.
David Steinberg
#97. When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
Quentin Tarantino
#98. Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do.
Quentin Tarantino
#99. I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years, and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that.
Scott Adsit
#100. I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.
Cary Fukunaga
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
