Directors Quotes - Page 8

When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

To the audience it doesn't really matter how much the director struggled with an actor. It's the result that counts.

I am not funny. The writers were funny. My directors were funny. The situations were funny… What I am is brave. I have never been scared. Not when I did movies, certainly not when I was a model and not when I did I Love Lucy.

When you're a lead role, I'm learning that you set a tone for the movie in a way, like a director does, or like other actors do. But it seems like you set a mood on set.

Shaping it is something I would expect to do together with a writer, because that's a director's job.

When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.

For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put the make-up on.

I was so disappointed [with movie Forsaken], but maybe I hadn't talked enough with the director. I don't know. But, Kiefer worked it out. Kiefer took it and re-edited it. I don't know whether he talks about that. He's probably more discreet than I am because Jon is a friend of his. Now, it fulfills what I was hoping for, and what we were working on and doing.

I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.

I learned a lot from Clint [Eastwood], who's an extremely economic director. I learned a lot from Michael Winterbottom, who really gave a lot of trust in the actors and allowed them to live in the space instead of trying to manipulate and make it too set and too staged. Working with [Robert] De Niro taught me a lot of being an actors' director and what that is. I've learned a lot from pretty much everybody. Hopefully I've picked up something from everybody I've worked with.

There are definitely reasons to do certain things, but I like to stick to good director, good actor, good script.

They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

When you are completely satisfied with what you have made, you're pretty much done as a director. So when that happens, that'll sort of be the end.

When I was younger, I would mess about and have a laugh with everyone. I was doing Atonement when I was about 12, and as we went to do this very serious scene, the director Joe [Wright] came up to me ... I'd been giggling right up to the beginning of the take. And he came up to me and said, "Okay, you need to be serious now." I completely idolized him.

I love working with the same actors repeatedly. That happens a lot. It's kind of inevitable, especially if you work with the same writers and directors and you start to form a company of actors. You gravitate towards each other.

At the first meeting of the newly constituted Warren Commission, [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book to help define the ideological parameters he proposed for the Commission's forthcoming work. American assassinations were different from European ones, he told the Commission. European assassinations were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone.

I had a choice. I could become an economist & managing director. I choose to do something else. I would have become much, much richer than I am. I choose to not do that. It's that simple.

If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would listen to the director.

I kind of end up getting caught up in whatever the rhythm of the movie is and how open the director is to changing things in the moment or finding it in rehearsal.

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

I think it's very easy to get caught up and think that how many hits you get in a magazine because you were seen out somewhere has anything to do with a director's opinion of you, and whether they could use you or not.

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

I will work with a director who has good material because at the end of the day, that's what counts.

In a love scene that's really advantageous because you don't have that horrible moment of: "We don't really know what we're supposed to be doing, we just know we're supposed to be snogging and then shagging." Then the director shouts "action" and it's like: "Should I feel her boobs? I don't want to feel her boobs!"