Quotes About Filmmaking

In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which - where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with 'Marley,' I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.

It's very important to me to understand myself and my place in the world. My films help me with that, and the more people see them, the more I am making a statement.

I shot 'Fruitvale Station' on super-16, and then I shot a movie called 'The Harvest' on 35mm, and then I shot 'Little Accidents' on 2-perf 35.

In the beginning, my equipment, I would rent them from teamster-types, really. I don't know where they got the cameras - I think from the TV stations. But I don't know if they asked the TV stations.

Someone once shared a statistic with me about how long it takes women to make their second films. On average, it's three years for men and eight years for women.

If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process.

What's important in the filmmaking process has stayed the same. Keep it small, keep it personal, keep it authentic, work with people you like and trust. That process is much longer than the filmmaking process. The development process is a long one, so try and say something of importance.

My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways, staying outside of it is easier for me.

I have a feeling that I might even disappoint some people by staying in this two to three million range and continuing to make character-driven stories.

My education as a filmmaker has been entirely practical. I started working professionally in the film business in 1970, and I've been at it steadily since, and I pay a lot of attention.

I steal from every movie ever made.

You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?

My own ambitions were eclectic. My father ran a steel plant, and I was expected to study metallurgy and end up at the steel plant when I finished high school at age 15. Despite my proficiency at science, I decided against it and instead went on to study filmmaking.

Before, it was just about making the films - and now it's releasing them. Which is a steep learning curve.

You can really shoot things you think might work on camera one way, then you can try it that way, and then if you think it could also work another way, you have that luxury of shooting a bunch of different steps, and then they can decide in editing what works the best.

Daniel Craig is brilliant as Bond: there is no question about that. But it's a different Bond. It's the cross pollination of 'The Bourne Identity' and 'James Bond;' that kind of style of filmmaking.

My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.

There is no reason why excellent pictures can't be made for $4-5 million.

It's no secret - I've said this before - people have mistaken me for a P.A. on the set. On my own set.

I'm very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the '40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the '70s is a big influence for me.

I was nominated for a live-action short-film Academy Award in 2003.

Normally I'm watching people become actors in the process of making the film. It's very important you have a lot of respect when you are dealing with young people. You are in charge of everything about the process. You're an adult and they're not.

They started saying stuff like 'Should we cut the movie? Is it too this, too that?' It got drastic. It got heated. I said, 'Wait a minute, folks. I didn't make 'Smokey' for big-city audiences. I made it for the South, the Midwest and Northwest. Those are my people.'

I don't do storyboarding, ever; I'm not interested in that.