Quotes About Filmmaking

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

My first time out of the gate, I made three movies in four years, and they were all very back to back to back.

Making movies is controlled anarchy, chaos.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.

I think my passion for cinema really started when I was on the set of 'Mud' and my third film 'Joe.' That's when I really started to fall in love with the art of filmmaking.

I think that there's something about short films that just kind of keeps your muscles sharp.

After 'The Blues Brothers,' I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly.

I'm not going to be labeled a black filmmaker. I am not here to just tell black stories. I'm here to tell all kinds of stories, musicals and dramas.

I like to make films, but the only reason I do is because I'm a very bad musician.

On 'Black Hawk Down,' I was employing 1,000 Muslims. 'Kingdom of Heaven,' same deal except bigger, probably 1,500 Muslims.

'The Movie' is something that I made with some friends of mine in L.A. My friend, Luke Eberl, is the filmmaker. He shot this movie and asked a bunch of his friends to be involved with it. I just saw him the other day and there is no money to finish the film. But, you know, I literally have a cameo in it.

I enjoy being an actor in my own movies.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.

For me, I'm a filmmaker because, above all, I'm an explorer. It's my way of exploring and investigating the problems, the questions, and the mysteries about what it means to be human that vex me most, that keep me up at night, and that, when I finally fall asleep, insinuate themselves into my dreams.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.

We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.

Someone asked me the other day, 'What's the biggest influence on your filmmaking career?' And they started naming filmmakers. I went 'Naw, it's Jesus actually.'

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

I filmed my first narrative feature in 2006, a story set in Rwanda called 'Munyurangabo.'

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them.

I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.