Director Quotes

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

I was a disinterested student.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

I loved Luke Skywalker and I loved Darth Vader and I loved watching them work it out.

I like the idea of R-rated franchises.

I like studios. I just don't like bureaucracies.

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.

For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.

For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine.

And I love shooting football.

Again, a franchise to me doesn't have to be a billion dollar title.

A lot of people hated 'Alien 3.'

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

When I do the music, I make the musicians listen to what's happening in the film. That way they treat the dialogue as if it was a singer.

There's nothing I've done which I'm ashamed of or I thought was actually bad.

Then I became interested in drama, and almost by accident, I drifted into film.

The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.

One of the things I love about cinema is the range.

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

It's difficult working with very rich actors, because inevitably they become a little spoilt, and the managers and agents tend to control things more than is healthy.

In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material.