Quotes About Filmmaking

The most difficult part of making movies is to keep making them. Maybe, you could make the biggest hit in the world, but then the big problem is what to do next and how to maintain devoted to a certain instinct that I have about films.

Making movies is all about instinct.

I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.

I'm very instinctive when I choose my roles, and usually, the number one thing has to be the director.

I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth.' He's inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I'm just instinctively drawn to them.

I have learnt not to ignore instincts. While making a film, when your gut feels that you are going wrong, please take that seriously.

It's not really that I'm interested in filmmaking. I'm interested in the instrument of it, you know.

When I cast someone in a movie, I have to absolutely trust who they are as a human being. Trust is the intangible of moviemaking.

I'm a filmmaker and I intend to continue making films of all kinds, in any manner, shape, or form - short or long.

The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there'd always be beats where I'd go, 'Oh... well, that's skilful, in a way, but it doesn't get the flavour I'd intended in the script.'

As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn't have taken, so to be able to say, 'This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I'll live by,' I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.

Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.

I don't really make movies with an intention other than asking myself, 'Do I love the character, and do I love the story?'

I moved to L.A. to write and direct. I had no intentions of being in front of the camera.

The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.

There is no guaranteed formula. And that's one of the interesting things about filmmaking. You could put $115 million in, and it doesn't guarantee success.

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

When you're writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you're going to do. You don't have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.

'Sholay' can be given so many interpretations. I have seen this film so many times since the time I was a kid that I think that there could be 50 lovely interpretations to this film. Different filmmakers can give it so many interpretations, as it's a lovely film.

We see not because everything is visible, but because something always defies the eye, persisting beyond the remit of mere representation. This something, which Pasolini endeavors to situate at the heart of filmmaking, is preceisely 'that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consicousness' (Lacan, 1998).

Good directing is good writing and good casting.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

More and more, you're seeing television shows that are better than 99% of the movies out there. I mean, you watch something like the last couple of seasons of 'The Sopranos,' which is some of the most sophisticated writing I've ever seen filmed and some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen - and it's a TV show.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.