Director Quotes

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

But my humble opinion is, I'm not quite sure where I stand on the legalization of drugs - though, if tequila is legal, pot should probably be legal.

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s.

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

Filmmaking has always involved pairs: a director coupled with a producer, a director alongside an editor... The notion of couples is not foreign to cinema.

Filming is like a house, you have to feel comfortable in it.

Film-makers in Belgium are seen as arts and crafts makers. It is a small country. There is not really a film industry there at all.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

In Europe, there are many filmmakers working in the same territory: immigration, and the things that are most disruptive to European life today. That's not a judgment. I think it's good that cinema looks at such things.

In documentaries, you're confronted with reality; you can not manipulate or move it.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

I think once you've finished a movie you really have to detach from it so that you can come back and watch it as an audience member.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

I am fascinated with times past.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.

I don't think you can ever be ahead of your time with cynicism about that subject. No, I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was very much a product of its time.

Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio executive heroine have to go out and try to bring him back.

Ring up your parents and ring up your kids and tell them that you love them.

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

Most theater methodology is predicated on the idea of repeated actions. That's what you work toward. Having the actor repeat the same moment eight times a week. In a film, it's getting that one moment right.