Film Directing Quotes

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.

People have forgotten how to tell a story.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied... That's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

Drumming is like film directing. You build a framework for everyone to create something together.

I directed three films and each time [I act] I hope it's the last time so I have time to do my film [directing].

The dynamics of film directing and fashion design - in the ways that I've done it - were not dissimilar.

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.