Filmmakers Quotes

“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.”
― Werner Herzog

“Buscar la verdad es la mayor virtud y es lo que hace que un drama sea interesante. No me interesa contar historias con perfume de rosas en las que todo va bien”
― Clint Eastwood

“I made my first film on 16mm. Then I began using 35mm.Then I began working in Hollywood. And I began to really understand how films were made by professionals. I have to say I wasn't very impressed.”
― Mike Figgis, Digital Filmmaking

“If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene and enjoy it, that idea is worth making for the world to see. It can change someone's life.”
― Craig Mapp

“On the one hand, these filmmakers are the descendants of the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the century. One of the important ideological components of the May Fourth movement was its radical antitraditional stance, exemplified by its famous slogan: "Smash the Confucian Temple" (zalan kongjiadian).”
― Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China

“Filmmaking is not the work of the weak-minded. It may not be rocket science, but it requires ten times more strength of the mind than that.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Film Testament

“If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making.”
― Craig Mapp

“If we think that these women filmmakers have worked 'in the margins,' it is we who have kept them there.”
― Michele Meek, Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos

“Film gives us a second chance at a first impression.”
― Adrienne Posey

“All I cared about was if the shot was pretty,' she said. 'You're a young filmmaker and you get a nice lens and the dailies can make it seem like you got a movie, but you don’t. You start editing it and realize you’re left with a bunch of beautiful images, but no story. Everyone on set is too easily impressed by a nice camera.

And then there’s the writing. I guess it’s a pet peeve—when perfect people write in disease or abuse in order to make a story emotional. It hurts me. There doesn’t need to be cancer or death. I would cry at a simple line—like... a sad husband telling his wife that he’s concerned their dog is the only thing that keeps their marriage interesting.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Beneath the nice book cover, camera angles, format of the page, size of the canvas, sound of the song – was someone with something to say.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Harvey Weinstein took pride in not paying bills,” recounted Miramax’s former chief financial officer John Schmidt. “But when you stiff a filmmaker you are stiffing the very lifeblood of what your business is. The whole independent film business is based on championing the small guy.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“Director of 48 Hrs. (1982), Walter Hill, says of the studio in the early-1980s, 'Paramount in those days was a very unpleasant place to work. That was their style.”
― Kim Masters, The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else

“People outside the industry pruriently ask how he gets through sex scenes, nudity, baring it physically. They miss the point.
Sure, that takes some courage. But, man, it’s ALL like that.
Try crying in front of sixty-three people, most of whom are there to do jobs like lighting your face so the tears are in focus while the snot and spit fall behind — or surrounding you with mics to make sure the sound of your sobbing, disconsolate self falling apart is picked up cleanly, so you won’t have to dub over it in post six months later. That crew of people, expertly watching you turn feral with the grief that’s causing your character to make monumentally bad decisions leading to the epiphany that finally turns it around in the third act. Could anything be more naked, more intimate than tearing your soul inside out in service to the
story?
It’s tantric.
Visceral.”
― Laurie Perez, Unbraiding: Actor | Producer | Father: A Story in Three Strands

“The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth About Female Power in Hollywood

“Clint finally became fed up with his wife, Maggie. ‘He just turned around and cold-cocked her,’ recollected Fritz Manes. ‘Just decked her — knocked her right flat on her ass, clear from the living room into the bathtub in the bathroom.”
― Patrick McGilligan, Clint: The Life and Legend

“Regarding Clint’s methods (as a director), he was a very impatient man who doesn’t really plan his pictures or do any homework, truthfully. He figures he can go right in and sail right through these things. Clint was just as impatient as an actor, especially in an action picture when directing himself. For example, Clint was always blowing his lines. It’s very hard for him to say more than four lines consecutively.

And no matter if Clint forgot his lines, he would insist that the camera pick up the dialogue just where he had left off, without going back and starting the lines over. It was the cameraman’s problem to choose different angles and make the pickups, or transitions, work. Notorious for doing his acting scenes with multiple pickups, Clint had an ironclad belief that everything could be fixed in the editing room. Nobody among his fans would notice the incongruities.”
― Patrick McGilligan, Clint: The Life and Legend

“I will never win an Oscar and do you know why?" Clint liked to aver. "Because I’m not Jewish.”
― Patrick McGilligan, Clint: The Life and Legend