Mark Romanek Quotations

Most videos are about creating eye candy, a pretty image that can be a marketing tool. We just tried to show the simple truth of what's going on in his life. It's kind of a sucker punch when you see it the first time because we're not used to that emotional depth in music videos.

Music videos were this lucky career opportunity. They were assignments. I was providing a service, and they were meant to be punchy and gimmicky and fun.

I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.

From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

Here's my tip: Have your production hire the best hair stylists on the planet to do your films and commercials, then casually hint about how great it would be to get a trim during lunch break.

I thought about him in Seize the Day and his cameo in Dead Again , so it wasn't a leap to see him as a guy who's damaged goods. I think he connected to that guy. I think when someone has the talent Robin has, it makes you a bit of an outsider.

I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.

You can have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down.

Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.

I learned that when you're lucky enough to be surrounded by such talented people that you really become more of an orchestrator of this talent - you're just trying to harmonise everyone's contributions.

I'm of the school that I will direct you if you request it - if you have a question.

In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.

I have these ideas that people go 'Oh, that's cool. I'd pay to see it, but I'm not gonna give you $25 million.'

I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.

If you happen to have a spare $100 million floating around, then you're my producer.

I've found music over the course of my life is slightly more astoundingly inspiring than great cinema

I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.

The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.

All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.