Director Quotes
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For me, a director is a director immaterial of the gender. At the end of the day, the audience is only interested in watching a good film.
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In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.
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There is an isolated experience to being a director. It's very communal because there's a crew, but it's only you. You're the one on the hook.
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The director I had most involvement with was Alex Rockwell. He gave me a lot of responsibility as an actor.
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The core of a director is the person's tastes in what elements go together and how they go together. It's a puzzle.
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Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.
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As a director, I only know how to do it one way, is to pour my heart and soul into everything.
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One of my biggest fears as a director is that everything is taking too long on camera. The actor saying their lines, the silence between lines, the length of time it takes to walk from A to B. So you try it at different speeds and then see what sticks in the edit room.
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Good, bad mediocre or whatever it is, if a director wants me in his movie, I take it as a compliment.
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The lead actor, along with the director, plays a big role in what the vibe will be on set, and that's a huge responsibility.
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I think that what kind of is making this different is the creative group of us that has come together and we're all kind of on the same page working towards the same goal. So it is a real collaborative effort of our hearts more than it is oh you have the writer, you have the director, the producer, whatever.
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I really love the experience of moving things around, in terms of being a director.
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My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don't remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.
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When Shana Alexander interviewed me for Life magazine in 1952, she gave up after 4,000. At one time or another, I've worked for every studio in Hollywood, for almost every director with most of the actors and actresses.
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"A good director is one that lets you improv," that's ridiculous. There's some actors who should not be improving and there are some scripts that should not be touched. I think it's just a case by case basis.
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As a director, if you know what you want, then it's not scary.
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American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie.
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Your director is your everything and you devote yourself to them and you want to help create their vision.
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Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.
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There's nothing worse than a director that keeps changing their mind. Because, unlike the directors I work with, I'm not decisive at all.
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'The Best Man' was my first feature film, and I didn't want to be known as a director who only does romantic comedies.
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I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.
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Every director is themselves; they're not playing a part.
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The director can't do your job for you. He can't get in front of the camera and perform your part.
