Quotes About Filmmaking

When I made 'The Notebook,' the director, Nick Cassavetes, who is John's son, used to show me his father's movies.

Over the years with movies, I've given directors notes.

Essentially, we wanted to be in one of Azazel's films, so the notion was we'd simply write an Azazel Jacobs movie ourselves, and then give it to him and be like, 'Right, here's you next film, now direct us. Go.'

I may find myself changing my notions about what I want to do right in the middle of a film. And on days when I'm feeling merry, I shoot merry scenes, and on gloomy days, I shoot gloomy ones.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

This was truly guerilla filmmaking. We shot out in the middle of nowhere in a place called Delta Flats, where basically every day was some new minor catastrophe.

You can only be yourself, and it sounds cheesy, but when it comes to filmmaking, there's really nowhere to hide.

Many filmmakers have had that experience. They make a movie, then out of nowhere, they either pass censorship or fail.

I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.

In a nutshell, directing 'The Gift' was all about understanding how the complex machine that is 'Game of Thrones' works.

The great thing about 'Fargo' is that it's a more objective style of filmmaking: the camera moves in very classical ways, and the most interesting things normally are the characters.

I wish that every director was as interested in doing as much in camera and with physical objects as much as possible as J.J. Abrams is.

I'm really fascinated by other directors' methods. I've done a lot of learning by observation.

I am a keen observer of my own films; I also try to discover myself through the movies I make.

What frustrates me a lot about some aspects of filmmaking is people thinking everyone is really dumb and that we have to make everything really obvious.

Occasionally, we would shoot something and think, 'This is it; we are over the line.' But the test audiences didn't have a problem with it.

Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.

Watching John Lasseter's films, I think I can understand better than anyone that what he's doing, is going straight ahead with his vision and working really hard to get that vision into film form. And I feel that my understanding this of him is my friendship towards him.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

Of course, I'd like to produce and direct a blockbuster, but you gotta build up to that. So now I'm learning from a bunch of little movies. And it's more fun with smaller pictures. It's more creative.

I'm an independent filmmaker with complete creative control of my films. I hire who I want. I have final cut. But at the same time, I go directly to Hollywood for financing and distribution. I find it's best for me to work within the Hollywood system.

Filmmaking is a very collaborative art. Unlike a painting that an artist paints sitting by himself, as a director, you have to work with a team.

The best deal about being a producer is that unlike a director who has to go on the sets even if he doesn't get along with the actor, the producer has the liberty to remain behind the scenes.

It seems quite unlikely that I'll make a masala film.