Quotes About Filmmaking

The first I paid to see with my own money was 'Laputa Castle In The Sky.' And I was like, wow! I really shocked by it. So I want to make movies that have a similar impact on the audience to that.

My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, 'That's a wrap,' after the last shot, fall over dead, and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me.

When I'm shooting, it averages out at a 16-hour day. You have two deadlines everyday - lunch and wrap.

I was actually shooting 'Warm Bodies' on the day that '50/50' came out, which I don't recommend to other filmmakers because I was sort of a wreck. Actually, it was good for me, because I had work to do, so I couldn't obsess all day and be checking how '50/50' was doing!

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

I don't consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

Justin Theroux is the ideal team partner to have. He's a writer. He's a director.

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

Film schools didn't exist when I was growing up. I learned by working with clever people. Good writers and cinematographers.

I really admire Mark Ruffalo and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Vincent Gallo, for example, who writes and directs and acts in his own films.

Writing is fantasizing about what your film will be like. Shooting is reality. And the post-production is recovering the idea you had.

When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.

I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

In the course of my movies, the financing and the releasing were always the tough part. Because I loved the creative; I loved the writing. I loved the making of it. Because, I guess, I never had the giant blockbuster, I never got that sort of ease for the next one.

Making films take a lot of intelligence and is tough, though achieving Economics honours is tough, too.

For me, making a mass film is tougher. A lot of things needed to be intertwined into a two-hour narrative without getting too complicated.

It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.

I started as a short filmmaker and found that one of the toughest challenges was getting your film to be watched. I would enter it in competitions and release it online, but getting a mainstream theatre-going audience to view the film is difficult.

I found that direction is the most enjoyable part in filmmaking. The easiest and most comfortable is acting and the loneliest and toughest is writing.

I've learned a great deal about a certain type of filmmaking. But I have ambitions toward another type of filmmaking that I haven't been allowed to engage in yet.