Quotes About Director

First, I have to read something and find it interesting and like the story. If I don't understand it fully, but there is something in there that is interesting, then it takes a director to convince me. If he can't do that, then I don't go with it. It doesn't matter where the project comes from.

I've been a writer for years, but it was mainly as a function of trying to be a director, so I just got work as a writer. I want to keep directing.

It's funny: when you make a film, you always look back, and there are always crucial decisions that get made. You look back, and at the time they don't seem like it, but you look back, and you see they were absolutely fundamental.

I've always said I would want to be a funeral director if I wasn't an actor.

I love film noir, so Billy Wilder is like my favorite director of all time.

In the case of the FBI, I revealed that William Sessions, the FBI director, had been engaging in abuses of all kinds, and I exposed that. And that led to his dismissal by President Clinton.

For example I don't work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They're different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don't impose that on the actors.

Producers now look at the talent and if they believe that the director has the potential, they are willing to shell out the money irrespective of the gender.

Cinema is a director's medium, so you're saying, 'What do you want?' Being an actor is about adapting - physically and emotionally. If that means you have to look great for it and they can make you look great, then thank you. And if you have to have everything washed away, then I'm willing to do that too.

I met my agent through a casting director here in Wilmington after I auditioned for a Disney movie.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

To be honest, the real reason I did 'Drive' was because of Nicolas Winding Refn, the director.

I think 'North by Northwest' and 'Rope' and Rear Window' and 'Psycho' are on my list of favorite all time movies. I just think his kind of command as a director was almost unparalleled, and I feel like in certain ways the sort of character-based thriller owes more to Hitchcock than anyone.

I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.

For me, you have to do as much work as you can beforehand and, once you get on stage or set, throw it out the window because you need to be collaborative. You shouldn't have too many ideas about where it goes before you get into the room with the director and other actors.

Technology has grown so much that there's a whole idea of gluttony. Sometimes you get carried away because you can have a camera go through the window, but do I need a camera go through the window? Those choices are up to the director.

Especially as a director on 'West Wing,' I directed a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and really stretched my wings.

Tone is so important because you can have a great script just be ruined with the wrong director - if they shtick it up or something. With 'Little Miss Sunshine,' I was so concerned they weren't going to play the pageant official realistically because you don't have to wink to play those kinds of characters.

I look at someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and I have so much admiration. She's playing in the boy's sandpit, and winning.

When 'The Master' came around, they said they wanted to try and find a part for me, and I got a text from the casting director saying that.

I respect the fact that a director has studied the text and the road map of work before us, the subtleties, interconnections, underpinnings... His job is to paint the entire picture and knows all the colors that have to be in it.

Composing is to think. It is to have your mind trying to find what is the best sound that the movie is going for: the best melody, the best texture, the best structure and dramaturgic arc for the film. Then you discuss that with the director. He's the leader. He's the one showing you the path to follow to find the soul of the film.

I'm thankful that my career at Oklahoma was marked with consistent leadership in president David Boren and director of athletics Joe Castiglione.

I am so thankful to work with Shashank Khaitan because of the kind of person that he is. One of the things I am most thankful for is to have Shashank as my first director and as a mentor.