Director Quotes
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Ang Lee's been nominated for best director for "Life of Pi," which is what I'm going to call the six weeks after I take this dress off.
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One final thing a director needs: The ability to say 'I am wrong' or 'I was wrong.' Not as easy as it sounds. But in many situations, these 3 words, honestly spoken, will save the day.
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As a director, you always want things to look good. You're always trying to make things look tidy. That's what we're all trained to do.
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In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.
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Each Catwoman is specific to the Gotham City she lives in and the director that helps shape her. So it's kind of hard to have a favorite and I'm not just being political, it's hard to have a favorite because each one is so specific as themselves.
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I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.
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It's important for me to work with a strong director because I know I can go to some really deep places, I just need direction on how to get there.
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I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there.
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One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.
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It doesn't matter if I have experienced actors alongside or novices. It doesn't matter if the director is one film old or a hundred. All I'm interested in is doing justice to the role.
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I think one of the things you have to be aware of as an actor is that if you come on the set and see the director standing there mouthing all the words while a scene is going on, that's usually a very bad sign because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head. He knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and you're not going to dissuade him.
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The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.
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As a director, you never think about how an audience would respond. You can think about that, but you will never change what you're going to do.
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As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people.
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For my entire career, I wanted to be a director. When I was in the theater, it was very difficult to get directing jobs, and I fell into the acting by default. I got in the habit of accepting whatever came my way. Not things that I disagreed with, though. It's not like I had aspirations - well, I did have aspirations to play Hamlet, which I ended up doing.
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The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor.
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I don't really consider myself a female director, and I don't want to do so for other women. Female directors are just directors.
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From my side, I don't put pressure on the director to cater to a certain image. I am happy to do different films, and I have to stick by my director. I like to completely surrender myself to the director - that way, I think, I don't get to do the similar roles.
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In Germany, actors tend to be more laid-back and take orders from the director: 'Tell me what you want.' I'm more into collaboration. So are Americans.
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Working with a great director is like getting a master class in acting.
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I don't worry about what everyone wants to see. I make movies that please a writer, director and myself. I always think there are enough people smart as me and sensitive as me.
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Theater is about interpretation and what an actor and what a director brings to a piece too. I'm open to it every time I work with a director and a group of actors. I have to be open to that interpretation. I'm not one of those hysterical playwrights that come and say, "This is not what I intended to do." It's one rendition of the piece.
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In Hong Kong, in our generation that started out in the 1970s, being a director wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have director's chairs. We weren't particularly well paid. The social standing of a film director wasn't that high. It was a sort of a plebeian job, a second or third grade one. And the studio heads are always practical, there's never any fawning because someone is a director. There's very little snobbery about one's position as a director. The only ones people treated differently were those that were also stars; or the directors who also owned their companies.
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I am not interested in simply working as a director. If I am not making movies that I want to make, that I feel passionate about, or that I feel are hopefully at the level of cinematic quality that I feel they should be then I am not really that interested.
