Quotes About Filmmaking

I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I'm not going to make a Haneke film. That's just not in my DNA.

I like Michael Bay a whole lot. And Jerry Bruckheimer. But I love Ben Affleck as a person, as a director, as an actor.

I've always worked with a team of actors and filmmakers ever since I was a kid in Michigan making Super-8 movies.

My daughter Mickey is an actress, and I tell her women need to make their own films; they should always be looking for stories to develop themselves and go to acting class - not that she needs much prompting in that!

You have to go through a big process with the Directors Guild in order to get co-direction credit. They sit you in front of this microphone in front of like 40 legendary directors, and they start grilling you.

Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are the people I look up to. They are quality film-makers making interesting, controversial, ground-breaking movies with very little eye on the marketplace.

I've worked with people from Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, through to Richard Fleischer, all of those boys from Hollywood and so on, and Sam Peckinpah and then the Mike Radfords.

Mike Leigh is my all-time favourite writer/director/creator.

When I started as a filmmaker, I never, ever imagined in a million years that I would be doing television because, at that time, TV was a very different medium.

I've been told that some guy wrote something like, 'Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.' Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn't ever say that. It's not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.

I connect with all of the characters in my films. That's what makes you want to make a film, that you can enter the mindset, the situation, the conflict, the contradictions.

I want people to think of me as a 'Mindset' guy, a journalist, a commentator, a social media personality, a filmmaker, an author, but I got to - I have to pivot so far away from anything pro-Trump, I just got to keep going that way.

There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.

We knew people in Cleveland who had been making movies for 20 years that nobody sees. Every couple of years, they make a little small movie on their own, and it goes to some minor festivals, and that's it. Four years later, they do it again. That's a fulfilling life for some filmmakers, and they're happy to work that way.

I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind

My God, we ate, slept and dreamed our pictures.

Making Young Frankenstein was the happiest I'd ever been on a film.

The guy that made me wanna make movies... and this is off the wall-is a guy named Michael Pal, the British director.

Peter Jackson was very good to me after I made my first film, he was really one of the best things that happened after that movie. I was invited to New Zealand to go hang out with him on 'The Hobbit', and so for two weeks I got to sit next to him and watch him direct, and it was the most amazing experience you could ever have.

What I would say to filmmakers, if I may be so bold or so arrogant, is to draw inspiration from other filmmakers, but go to the place in your own gut where everything is nothing. That's a very Zen thing to say, but that place of nothing is where real creativity comes out of.

I would like to find a way to embrace what Led Zeppelin did, in filmmaking.

Zero budget filmmaking is frustrating but also liberating.

I go to conventions and universities and talk to young filmmakers and everybody's making a zombie movie! It's because it's easy to get the neighbors to come out, put some ketchup on them.

I'll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.