Quotes About Filmmaking

I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant, so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.

Basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.

Work eight hours a day for a living and many more hours a day making movies and you'll work all your life to be a success overnight.

To make films is as boring as watching paint dry. You usually have to do tiny bits here and there. You go off waiting for lighting, you come back - the energy dies. You hope you can find someone who can keep it going.

Before, it was just about making the films - and now it's releasing them. Which is a steep learning curve.

I look at American movies, the big muscles, and try to apply that to Chinese film-making.

I don't have incredible knowledge about films or of filmmaking history I'm not that kind of person.

Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.

'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

Filmmaking has been my love since my mother brought me to see James Whale's 'Frankenstein' at the local library at the age of six.

I characterize myself a little bit as a reluctant filmmaker. I learned from watching my friend in college stay up late at night, at 2 A.M., just to get the lighting right, and I thought, 'You know what, if that's what it's going to be like, I think I'm just going to write,' and I did that.

When you direct a movie that makes no money whatsoever, there is no rush to your door for the next one.

I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

I would like to direct. I am also happy helping other directors realise their vision. I am happy being a cog in a wheel.

Whereas money is a means to an end for a filmmaker, to the corporate mind money is the end. Right now, I think independent film is very confused, because there's excess pressure in the marketplace for entertainment to pay off.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

One of the very, very exciting things I have found here in L.A. is that no one talks to you about being Scottish. Whereas, if you are in London and you are trying to put films together and be a film-maker, there is a kind of unspoken sense that, if you are Scottish, you have something to overcome or else you cannot really do that project.

For filmmakers who've made multiple movies, they have experience, but they only have experience of themselves as a filmmaker. Whereas I'm bouncing around from different skill sets: the organizational ability of Ridley Scott to the precision of a Ron Howard to the artistic sensibilities of a Peter Weir... to the scope of a Tom Hooper.

Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'

I want to be able to go wherever I want to go, do whatever I want to do. I guard the material and the filmmaker.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

For a filmmaker, whether the film is liked, understood or appreciated counts as much as the moolah.

I often make films about subjects I don't really know much about. Maybe it's laziness, but I don't go in there having done a tonne of research; the research happens while I'm making the film.

Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.