Quotes on Filmmaker

But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting

I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.

What I react against in other people's work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don't believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don't really respond to, but I'm telling myself, 'Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,' then I know I'm on the wrong track and I just throw it out.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think, "Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire". These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.

Most filmmakers can't afford to try something out that doesn't work.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

Not every successful man is a good father. But every good father is a successful man.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

In the most basic terms it was about how when we experience art without critical awareness we consent to the ideas being promoted, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the filmmaker. For instance, if you watch a racist comedian and laugh at his jokes, you are consenting to the prejudices inherent within them. Similarly, if you watch a movie which perpetuates conventional ideas about race, gender, etc., you are consenting to them and not affecting change in any way.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.