Quotes from Mark Romanek

I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.

All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.

The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.

In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.

I've found music over the course of my life is slightly more astoundingly inspiring than great cinema

I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.

I'm of the school that I will direct you if you request it - if you have a question.

From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.

Here's my tip: Have your production hire the best hair stylists on the planet to do your films and commercials, then casually hint about how great it would be to get a trim during lunch break.

Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.