Quotes About Filmmaking

It's sweet to hear, but anyone who says that they want to be the next John Cassavetes is crazy. He had it so tough. No one would want to walk a step in his shoes. Believe me - I wouldn't.

I'm a control freak, and anytime I direct something, I try to make it as homemade and handmade as possible. I feel like that's my favorite type of filmmaking, where you can see the seams, and it doesn't feel like a swiftly produced, whole seeky-eyed event.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

Filmmaking is hard. I mean, it's not that hard, but it is hard to find your way through a system because there's a lot of people, there's money, there's a big machine to kind of make it - and how to find methods and processes that allow it to continue to be a lively process and a creative process.

Essentially, filmmakers have to be free and not directed by power or politicians.

They had some really cool rigged cars and things that were different that they would tow behind the camera car that were actually on these trailers that manipulated side to side and stuff like they were getting hit, and actually put the actor right in the middle of the chase.

You have to understand the tone of the movie, because if it's supposed to be funny, it can be funny violent like the Home Alone stuff, but you have to really understand the tone of what you're doing and make the action work for that and for the character.

As a filmmaker you have to keep asking yourself the question are we really going to impress them [audience] either by the wow factor, the intelligence factor, the I didn't see that coming factor?

I could spend whole days at Cinecittà. There, I am the greatest director of all time. On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach, I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach, and offshore I re-create the storm rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet.

It was difficult, but I managed. When I had money, I'd buy film and we'd shoot. I think your first film should be made with your own blood. [On producing his first full length film, Le Silence de la Mer (1949) himself]

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

It's a bit like school camp, shooting a film. Everyone's on heat. It's a strange energy. It's full of adrenalin. I funnel my excess energy in funny little ways. I do a lot of dancing in my trailer. I love music.

I would be a terrible director, I could never write anything. One of my great strengths is that I know all of my weaknesses.

I'm trying my hand at directing. I'm doing an independent movie that we haven't started casting yet, but it's like an edgy version of 'Lethal Weapon' and '48 Hours,' only with two women in it.

To make a movie is very grueling at times. Long, long hours and cold weather.

A normal day of working in Burbank is 14 hours, sometimes more. On 'The Revenant' sometimes it was eight hours, but we were shooting only five. So they were short days, but they were very strenuous because of the weather. And it was very dark.

Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.

The web offers a creative climate that filmmakers have been craving for.

In the late '80s, as a child, I used to shoot short films on my friend's wedding camera.

We just said, 'Okay, you're in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you're on camera, that's your wardrobe.' But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.

I started learning filmmaking by joining a weekend film school in Bengaluru. I made some amateur short films that got appreciation from people around me.

It was seventh grade or something like that when we started falling in love with stuff like Sam Raimi and Wes Craven and John Carpenter. Also, our filmmaking skills were getting a little more polished, so we thought we could actually make something that was not funny.

As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that's less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.

That's one thing I never had to do on a Mike Bay set is sit around and pontificate about the next scene; there's no time for it. You're already in the next scene.