Quotes About Filmmaking

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

We used to take two years to complete a film, and sometimes, we used to be told on the sets that the scenes are still being written. Everything today is pre-planned.

When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.

I had written a script called 'Freed,' which I had wanted to direct.

Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.

To have someone like Clint Eastwood come along and shoot your first draft as written is just any screenwriter's dream. And Clint is very straightforward. If it's good enough to get his attention, it's good enough to produce.

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

J. J. Abrams is a director that I've admired for a long time, from the very first scripts he wrote - including 'Regarding Henry,' which I was in.

I'm a big fan of Woody Allen. I used to love the fact that he wrote his own screenplay and acted in the movie.

I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.

And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

A government institution called the Finnish Film Foundation funds filmmaking there, and I wrote several screenplays but never got any money. They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them.

I started making little films with a 16 mm camera as an undergraduate at Yale. My first job out of college was 'assistant editor' on a forgettable low budget feature.

My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.

When I was a kid, I would make these incredibly bloody movies in my back yard. I was constantly making weird blood concoctions; Jell-O and milk was a good one. I was constantly ruining clothes and staining my parents' walls and stuff.

In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.

Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you.

Yeah, I'd be happy to go back to Mexico or Japan to make another film.

I think it's particularly stupid that filmmakers have traditionally said, 'Yeah, I like baseball, but the movie's not going to be about the intricacies of the game.' I mean, you wouldn't cast an overweight guy with stubble if you were doing a ballet film.

Yeah, Kubrick's a big influence. In something like 'A Clockwork Orange,' he is trying to use the practical light - I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they're not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In 'Elephant' we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted.

I despise writing in general, but yeah, I love writing the stuff that I direct.