25 Filmmaker Quotes

1. As filmmakers, we can show where a person’s mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it. –Darren Aronofsky
2. You see so many movies… the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there’s no sense of film grammar. There’s no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It’s just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy. –Peter Bogdanovich
3. Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee. –James Cameron
4. Most people don’t know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, It’s very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to… As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad – to be willing to risk everything to really express it all. –John Cassavetes



5. The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues. –George Clooney
6. I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians. –Francis Ford Coppola
7. In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about. –Cameron Crowe
8. And I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town. –Frank Darabont
9. The camera lies all the time; lies 24 times/second. –Brian De Palma
10. My old drama coach used to say, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing. –Clint Eastwood



11. Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes. –John Ford
12. Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it’s all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters. –Samuel Fuller
13. A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. –Jean-Luc Godard
14. I’m a storyteller – that’s the chief function of a director. And they’re moving pictures, let’s make ‘em move! –Howard Hawks
15. The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. –John Huston
16. 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. –Stanley Kubrick
17. A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn’t intend to be there. –Spike Lee
18. For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident. –Sidney Lumet
19. I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well. –Christopher Nolan
20. I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way. –Sydney Pollack
21. Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. –Martin Scorsese



22. People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. –Steven Spielberg
23. I steal from every movie ever made. –Quentin Tarantino
24. I think it’s a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests, it’s not the other way around, that’s how I feel. — Lars Von Trier
25. If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless. –Daryl F. Zanuck

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