Quotes About Director

My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that's how I began studying.

I've loved musical theater ever since I was a kid. My mother's a pianist, and my grandfather was an amateur theater director and stand-up comic. And I was an only child. And I loved attention. So from an early age, my family was teaching old musical songs.

It's really cool when the thing you are working on as a small team gets embraced by millions, but in the end, it's about your character and the script and your director and the rest of the cast and crew.

Essentially, it is the director who is the creative head of a film. The final authority on all decisions lies with the director. That is how it should be. And then other team members can give their creative inputs.

I think if I wasn't a musician, I would be a high-school band director or orchestra director. I like working with large groups of musicians and bringing out the dynamics and accomplishing something as a team.

They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow's nastiest and best noirs, Where Danger Lives and His Kind of Woman) said he was the only director who could outdrink him. When he wasn't hitting the bar, Farrow liked to discuss theology with visiting nuns and priests.

The role of the director is to create a space where the actresses and actors can become more than they have ever been before, more than they have ever dreamed of being.

When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, "I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.

And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

Halloween put me on the map, and I'm very sad to hear of his death.

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment....would result in the demolition of society.

If being an attractive woman got you attention for directing, then the entire 'best director' category would be comprised of models. To me, that is just the most ludicrous connection that you could make.

I look at life as being cruise director on the Titanic. I may not get there, but I'm going first class.

For the casual viewer, Kurosawa's films can be an exercise in endurance.

Although the material Valerie gave me changed the direction of "Practical Cats," Cameron and I soon realized that to make a musical out of such a potpourri a writer would have to come on board. Faber boss Matthew Evans was extremely nervous and thought Valerie would find the idea difficult. It was now blindingly obvious that without a director with a pedigree like Trevor Nunn's she could veto "Practical Cats," at least as a musical.

a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

I do feel that I need to do at least one more Western - I think you need to make three Westerns to call yourself a Western director.

There's no question that Whale's movies are classics. They were wonderful, and successful.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that's good.

I think any performing artist can do films, or, as a matter of fact, anybody out there in the street can be a film actor with no experience whatsoever if you've got a good director.

For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like, 'How do I make this film?' That's part of the pleasure, and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.