Quotes About Filmmaking

As a director, your expectation and reality don't always match up, and I think that that's... I think it's a little jarring.

I'm not very good at knowing what people want. I don't have that talent. The best I can do is make films that resonate with me and see what happens.

I can work with both the old, revered filmmakers and new directors. It is amazing how they see me in their world, and then I adapt accordingly.

'Easy Rider' and 'The Last Movie' were the only films that I made totally on my own.

I was very happy when I was doing my first two films: 'Student No.1', 'Simhadri'. I had absolutely no doubts - I would just place my camera at one point and say, 'That is the right way.'

If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.

For me, movie-making is more than making a 'hit' film. It's about working with a team of people I really respect and doing something that gives me satisfaction.

Making films. It gave me a voice. Legitimately saved me.

To make the films I want, I just have to live within my means and scale down my lifestyle - and be with somebody who's cool with that.

Do I wish I was Martin Scorsese? Yeah. But am I really proud of the movies I've made and really happy that I get to keep making them? Yes.

I'm inspired by film-makers such as Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Orson Welles.

Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.

When I was young, with my brothers, we'd make movies all the time, and that was never scripted.

I want to make my own films from my own scripts based on stories I want to tell, but they take time to put together.

I think we'd like to direct. Not so much because we'd like to be directors... we'd like to see how one of our scripts would do if it didn't get changed.

I've seen 'Goodfellas' a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.

There is hunger to have good experiences with people. There will be roles and all of that. But the package of experience has today become important for me. People should be good, established; the filmmaking and acting experience should become heartening.

I don't do any editing while we're making the movie. I sit down and watch it all with my editor, we make longhand notes on pads, and then we begin our work.

A lot of feature films do two pages a day.

The thing is, you never know with any movie how it's going to turn out. It's always a mystery - you'll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.

All I know is this: The reason that I've gotten attention from this industry is that I just kept making films until they paid attention.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

As a filmmaker, I'm interminably curious and nosy, but certain times you meet people and think, 'I don't want to push you too hard because I can see this is painful for you.'

When you are working with low budgets and you have a gunshot with a squib and it goes wrong - the gun flash does not synchronize with the squib or whatever - it takes half an hour or 40 minutes to clean it all up and reset it. It's much easier to use a computer to paint in the flash and splatter.