I'm always being told by directors that I add chemistry to scenes, so I mean how difficult could it be?
When you're the director and the writer, you never have to remember your lines, and there's no one to call you on it. On Garden State I did different lines on every take, just making crap up. And it was great each time.
Most of the film directors expect their actors to want to work fast.
As you get older - for example, in our band we have members of our orchestra, like Carlos Enriquez and Ali Jackson and Walter Blanning. I taught them when they were in high school, and now they teach me.I'll regularly call Ali and say, "Man, can you break this rhythm down for me?" Or Carlos was actually our music director in Cuba, and he's been instrumental in a lot of my education, and I started to develop a saying with them, because they tease me all the time - you get older, you have that familiar relationship - I say, "You have to follow your young leadership, too."
I always thought it would be very funny if I was a blind film director.
I love westerns. John Ford is one of the 10 best directors.
I'm not aware that I was consciously influenced by any director, though these things often happen unnoticed, submerged in the unconscious.
As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around.
As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.
Ultimately, a more experienced director realizes that you've got to stop sometime and just move on. They're braver about that.
Another mistake a director can make is not to be prepared, so you get there on the day to shoot the scene, and they don't know how it should be blocked, and they're not clear on how they want to do a scene.
A good actor's director, first of all, is prepared, so there's not an exorbitant amount of wasted footage.
I've always felt it's the directors purview to say what; it's the actor's purview to say how. It's not good for an actor to have the big picture in mind - it bollocks you up. An actor's purview is the tiny little... We measure our performance in seconds.
With an inexperienced director, a lot of times the days go on to 14, 15, 16 hours. It goes horrendously overtime. And because of the lack of money, they just keep you there, regardless of the hours.
I feel like a lot of the young actors that are just coming up are really good. I think directors are directing better.
I've written a lot of scripts that someone else directed, and it's absolutely vital that, if I'm gonna act in it, then I have to take off the writer hat and let the director direct.
I love directors who talk action as opposed to emotion.
It's hard on an actor when you have to do a scene 45 times and you know damn well that three of the angles a director is shooting will never make it into the movie.
