45+ Massive Film Directors Quotes That Will Unlock Your True Potential

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.

To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script.

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

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

There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

A director standing by his film rejected by the audience is like him telling a girl 'I love myself and I don't care if you don't love me'.

Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense.

Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films.

They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It's A Wonderful Life and The Searchers.

You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

Life is like a B-picture script! It is that corny.

If I had my life story offered to me to film, I'd turn it down.

Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time.

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

I like, as a director and a spectator, simple, direct, frank films.

Nothing disgusts me more than snobbism, mannerism, technical gratuity... and, most of all, intellectualism.

All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.

Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.

I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium.

The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator.

Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique.

For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.

I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets.

There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.

One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.

The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one;

that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being.

A film is a director's vision... there is, however, much input an actor or actress can have.

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.

I was a bartender in New York and I overheard this girl saying she made $3000 doing a commercial. A kid at work told me, 'Hey, I know this director and he'd really like you!'. So I walked into this guy's office and was like 'I was thinking maybe I could make $3000' and he hired me for commercials, short films, like 15 jobs in a row.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

I think Hollywood has gone in a disastrous path.

It's terrible. The years of cinema that were great were the '30s, '40s, not so much the '50s...but then the foreign films took over and it was a great age of cinema as American directors were influenced by them and that fueled the '50s and '60s and '70s.

I always thought it would be very funny if I was a blind film director.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny.

You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did.

And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.

It's either because of the number of times the scholar puts the boot into Peter Jackson the director of The Lord of the Rings films or is making a point they have never heard of.

The writer must be a participant in the scene.

.. like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

I'm a person of the arts. I love the arts very, very, very much. And ah, I'm a musician, I'm a director, I'm a writer, I'm a composer, I'm a producer, and I love the medium. I love film very, very much. I think it's the most expressive of all of the art mediums.

Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.

Tom Hanks was really great [the 'Burbs'].

The director, Joe Dante, was wonderful. We filmed it here during the summer, every day at Universal. Even the food was good - I mean it was junk but it was really good. The whole thing was like some ideal summer-school experience. It may not have been the best movie ever, but it was certainly the most fun.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

When you think of a particular director, you think you would have liked to be with them on one particular film and not necessarily on some other one.

Most of the films I myself like don't do very well.

Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.