Film Directing Quotations

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied... That's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

The dynamics of film directing and fashion design - in the ways that I've done it - were not dissimilar.

Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.

I directed three films and each time [I act] I hope it's the last time so I have time to do my film [directing].

Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

I think it's a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don't feel that. You are all my guests, it's not the other way around, that's how I feel.

People have forgotten how to tell a story.

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.