Quotes About Filmmaking

Film-making is not liberating. It drains a lot out of you, and it's fulfilling only temporarily. It's a very thankless thing at times. When you're spending all that time on a film, you don't want 40,000 people to see it - it's just not enough. You dream of more.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

The hardest thing for me about making movies, and that included 'M*A*S*H' because it was made like a movie, was starting and stopping.

You still get the movies made. A filmmaker can always scrape up money to do a movie. The passion drives it. And you'll get the money. Money's the easiest thing. But the hardest thing is finding a way for people to see your movie.

I try to just focus on what feels right to me when I am conceiving it, conceptualizing, designing, etc. and then talk it through with the team and listen to what they have to say. This kind of thing is a team effort, and working with a great team is the most important part of filmmaking for me.

I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not.

The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.

The problem with most Hollywood movies is they don't give the director enough control.

Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it.

If I listen to 120 stories, I'd love 10 of them, seven would go on floors, four would get completed, three films will have the first copy ready, and one will release in theaters. This is how it has been for me.

I don't think it's the job of filmmakers to give anybody answers. I do think, though, that a good film makes you ask questions of yourself as you leave the theatre.

When I am shooting, I am inside the theatre, when I am in the editing room, I am inside the theatre. I always try to feel what they will feel. I see a film, not as a director, but as the audience. If I am entertained, they will be, too.

I think theatre is an actor's medium, while cinema is a director's medium.

And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.

I think it's important that filmmakers look at the technology and figure out how to make the theatrical experience a little more exciting.

I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.

Nobody makes movies bad on purpose.

Make sure you take some animation classes, because animation is pure filmmaking. You don't have to deal with the actors.

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

When somebody who makes movies for a living - either as an actor, writer, producer or director - lives to be a certain age, you have to admire them. It is an act of courage to make a film - a courage for which you are not prepared in the rest of life. It is very hard and very destructive. But we do it because we love it.

I never say "Action" or "Cut." Never. I think that would disturb the life from happening in and around everything.

But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me.