Film Directing Quotes

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

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

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.

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].

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

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.