Quotes About Movie-making

So I'm a one movie at a time person, I don't develop. Normally we do a movie then one thing leads to another. If something pops up that catches my attention, then I'll decide.

Ninety percent of the time, you're going to hear no. It took me seven years to make 'Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored.' Nobody wanted to see the movie made. I got the movie made.

You can't force a movie to happen. Movies happen when they're supposed to happen. Everything happens in God's time. I really believe that.

I would like to, in some capacity, observe how Tom Cruise goes about his business when it comes to making a movie and how he behaves on set and how he interacts with the crew because from everything that I've heard, it is the template for professionalism and just the way to conduct yourself as an actor.

I just find the people I want to work with and put it all together, and it's a lot of hard work, and all kinds of catastrophes happen, but I don't really get too much resistance. But when you make a movie, it seems like there's nothing but resistance. It's kind of a miracle that any movie ever gets made.

'North by Northwest' took two and a half to three months to film. When I look back, I realise I wasn't intimidated by Hitchcock and Cary Grant. They were so accepting of me.

I'm fed up with the idiots... the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies.

It's frustrating sometimes for actors because you slam it out and you have a great time, you think it's funny, and then for whatever reason the movie doesn't come together.

Every time I make a movie I think that it's going to be my last one, I think that no one is going to show up. I always have this sense that they're all going to fail. I am scared to death.

That's the most important thing to me - that if I'm gonna spend however long it takes to make a movie, give up 14 hours a day for however many weeks or months, then it's very important for me to know that I'm working with people who I respect and enjoy and that we're going for something together.

I'll say it, I love working with actors, I'm a fan of actors. They bring so much, and they can also break a movie, but when it works I give it all to the actors. I'll say it, I think that 'The Transporter' is great not because of my direction, it really is great because Jason Statham was great in it.

I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them, anyway!

When you do a play, you have the kind of nightly feeling of accomplishment. But you also have the daily dread of the doing it every night. And because you're doing the whole thing every day, it's like climbing up the mountain every single night. With a movie it's like climbing the mountain very slowly, over months of filming.

Very often, things that people may think come from the writer, very often don't. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to making a movie. When you hear a line of dialogue that sounds kind of tinny, it's pretty easy to cite the screenwriter. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into making a movie.

I can't cultivate a relationship with my child if it's between takes. I tried that on a movie and realized, 'This is not going to work.' It will work some of the year, but not 12 months a year.

When I'm in the middle of making a movie, I have blinders on; it's all about just getting the movie out.

Once you get one actor to say yes, that leads to a second, and the third yes leads to a fourth - there's a kind of comfort zone that occurs where each actor realizes, 'You're not selling this movie on me, so if it totally doesn't work, then its not all on my head.'

We always try to make the very best movie when we're working on and we can only think one at a time. We want to make this a perfect jewel, and then we'll see what happens after that.

'King Kong,' especially the first two acts of it, is a really good example of the use of miniatures mixed with digital characters and how convincing it was.

People will turn their noses up at a sequel or that type of thing, but Pixar really works hard - if they're making a sequel - to make a sequel an original movie, to make it an original story.

The roles that I feel I get, or handed to me, or whatever, are not that interesting. I don't think it's a problem that's specific to black women. I think it's a problem that's specific to movie-making in America.

'Little Miss Sunshine' snowballed. It was a tiny movie. We shot it in 30 days, and it was really fun to do, but it was one of those small movies that you don't hold out huge hope for.

The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.

I never make a movie for awards consideration. I will use the hope of getting an Academy Award a) to honor the people who work so hard and also b) it's the greatest Good Housekeeping seal in the world. It's the greatest brand. It's as good as Louis Vuitton and Dior in the world of moviemaking. It's the Super Bowl.