Explore Quotes on Directors

Once we get three more directors elected, the Sierra Club will no longer be pro-hunting and pro-trapping and we can use the resources of the $95-million-a-year budget to address some of these issues.

The more that I can work in different mediums, the more I can grow, and learn from different actors and different types of actors and directors and different styles of acting and build a tool box.

Any great director is also someone who is incredibly intelligent about whom they hire around them.

I've been very, very lucky in my career, in my life - from day one. When aspiring directors say, 'what's your advice?' first I say, 'be born the son of a famous director. It's invaluable.'

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays, and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater, where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts, but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

I'm really specific in the way that I shoot. I've always had a very good sense of what I need in the editing room. I used to shoot in a way that drew more attention to the camera and I've tried, in each film, to draw less and less attention to the camera. I think when you pay attention to the shots, you're aware of the fact that there's a director.

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.

Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.

Really, it's the director's job to disappear and allow the movie to just feel.

'Election' is a movie I'd give a leg to cross the director's name out and put mine in.

Being the son of a filmmaker, you are aware of a career as a director. You don't think of it as just movies, but as a life.

The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I've done before and hopefully it becomes a good movie.

I've had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let's you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, 'Well, put your hand over here.'

Being a [bank] director is like being a pilot of an aircraft - it's years of boredom and seconds of terror.

I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

You wouldn't believe how many FDA officials or relatives or acquaintances of FDA officials come to see me as patients in Hanover. You wouldn't believe this, or directors of the AMA, or ACA, or the presidents of orthodox cancer institutes. That's the fact

As a producer, I probably am a little stronger than most, since I was a director originally.

Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction.

I've never quite understood the idea of a "season." Whenever an artistic director says to me, 'I have this slot,' I always start to feel we're parking cars or something.