Directors Quotes

You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.

Miloš Forman is a great director; Jim Brooks is a wonderful writer and director.

It's an important thing to have a relationship with the director, and have it be a positive one.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.

In film school, I knew I wanted to be a director, but I found out pretty damn quickly that nobody was just going to hand me a script to direct.

Every time I was cast in a role, the director put a gun in my hand, so I figured I’d better learn how to use one. Then I found out I really liked it.

I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director's chair.

As a director, I've been able to combine with what I've learned as an actor and as a producer: it melds quite nicely into what I feel like I should have been doing all along.

On every movie I’ve done as a director, I look at the producers and having done it, I don’t envy them, at all.

I think it's very boring for a director to always do the same kind of movies.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

I believe, as a producer/director, your duty is to create a beautiful horror film that really resonates.

Some directors hardly talk to the actors at all.

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.

I don't have a director. The audience directs me.

I don't want to be a director. I want to direct. There's a difference.

I wouldn't want to be just pigeonholed as an extravagant director.

All I mean is, I'm not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it's not very loud. That doesn't mean I don't like the movie.

Music is just one of the tools a director has with which to paint and I think it's one of the most effective.

For some directors, I'm the actor from hell.

I get to play a great character while working with great actors and great directors on a great show.

I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.

There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.

I just do things because I fancy the parts and the directors.

I had no plans to be a director.

I want to do literally everything. I think I was gifted... I inherited one of the best comedy visionaries as a director.

What you want, as an actor, is a great leader. I can't bear it when I work with a director who is wishy-washy and says, "What did you think?"

It's kind of interesting to be a director who is all of a sudden being an actor playing an agent. This is my whole world!

A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's.

For a director and a producer to be named on the writing credits is practically unheard of.

The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.

Every Story is different, Every Movie is different, Every Director is different.

I'm not an easygoing guy as a director.

My sense is, I think it's okay for directors to do movies that speak to other work in their career.

I'm doing a little consulting. I'm somewhat retired, still a director of a company or two.

Jim Brooks is a very powerful director and it was a lot of intense work.

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.

I don't come in with any preconceived ideas, and although I will have done some preparation, I can go which way the director wants.

I've worked on shows where the lead actor doesn't know their lines, doesn't care, and it affects everybody - the crew, the director, the other actors. It's definitely a responsibility.

I believe that every director's films reflect their lifestyle.

As a painter you're responsible yourself, 100 percent. In film, you have the editor, the director, the other actors. It has the advantage of not being solitary.

Good is the director who lets you do what you have to do.

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.

The first thing I ask when Im offered a part is, Whos the director? which is something they never understand in Los Angeles.

I'm not the kind of director who aims to send a message out.

Ten years ago, it was really difficult for a young actress to walk onto a set and disagree with the director and having that be OK and have a conversation about it and everyone be cool with it.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

In the '90s, indie movies could get financing, because financers gave money straight to directors... Now it's a different system. Indie movies got co-opted by the studio system.

The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie.