Filmmaking quotes
Sourced quotes only — no fabricated attributions. Each quote links to its filmmaker page. Collection labels reflect how quotes were filed in our library, not verified job titles.
Showing 120 of 960 quotes.
“Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”
— James CameronDirecting“When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.”
— Robert RodriguezDirecting“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you’re not a traveler. You’re a f@@king tourist.”
— Guillermo del ToroDirecting“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
— Walt DisneyDirecting“Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.”
— John CassavetesDirecting“Let me just pause a minute and drink in this moment. And if you film it, I’ll be able to get free refills for life.”
— Jarod KintzDirecting“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.”
“There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.”
— Frank CapraDirecting“The characters in my films try to live honestly and make the most of the lives they’ve been given. I believe you must live honestly and develop your abilities to the full. People who do this are the real heroes.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.”
— Kathryn BigelowDirecting“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.”
— Jean-Luc GodardDirecting“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.”
— Stanley KubrickDirecting“The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know.”
— Brian De PalmaDirecting“Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a good writer.”
— George LucasDirecting“A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movie that you didn’t intend to be there.”
— Spike LeeDirecting“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God’s sake, I’m not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I’m making a movie that people are going to look at.”
— Ridley ScottDirecting“I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today’s movies. They believe everything they’re hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.”
— Christopher NolanDirecting“For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
— Jean CocteauDirecting“My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people’s idea of obsessive.”
— David FincherDirecting“If you have to have a job in this world, a high-priced movie star is a pretty good gig.”
— Tom HanksDirecting“I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“If a million people see my movie, I hope they see a million different movies.”
— Quentin TarantinoDirecting“The only safe thing is to take a chance.”
— Mike NicholsDirecting“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
— Michael CrichtonDirecting“First cuts are a bitch for a director, because it’s been so many months and you put your trust in your editor and you’re going to see your film assembled for the first time. You look at it and go, This is terrible. I hate it.”
— Richard DonnerDirecting“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.”
— Orson WellesDirecting“Casting is 65 percent of directing.”
— John FrankenheimerDirecting“You see so many movies… the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there’s no sense of film grammar. There’s no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It’s just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.”
— Peter BogdanovichDirecting“I couldn’t sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.”
— Darren AronofskyDirecting“Hollywood is great. I also think it’s stupid and small-minded and shortsighted.”
— David FincherDirecting“Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”
— Billy WilderDirecting“In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.”
— Cameron CroweDirecting“People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.”
— Steven SpielbergDirecting“Film is a battleground.”
— Samuel FullerDirecting“Our feeling is that the most important thing on a set is that actors have enough confidence to try different things. If there’s stress or tension, they won’t go out on a limb because they won’t want to embarrass themselves if they don’t feel completely comfortable.”
— Peter FarrellyDirecting“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”
— Charlie ChaplinDirecting“Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?”
— Steven SpielbergDirecting“Eighty percent of success is turning up.”
— Woody AllenDirecting“Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ve done my job.”
— Woody AllenDirecting“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”
— Wes CravenDirecting“We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.”
— Ethan CoenDirecting“Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it’s all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.”
— Samuel FullerDirecting“It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.”
— Akira KurosawaDirecting“But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.”
— George LucasDirecting“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.”
— Roman PolanskiDirecting“I’ve reached a place that many directors and filmmakers get to, and I’m grateful for that, and I can work within those boundaries. If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there’s an immense amount of freedom within the genre.”
— Wes CravenDirecting“I just want to tell good stories in ways that will shine a light on lives rarely seen on screen, because stories can push humanity forward.”
— Nia DacostaDirecting“It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they’re meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.”
— Ava DuVernayDirecting“Truly creative things happen when one thinks differently, yet nobody wants to think differently.”
— Shonda RhimesDirecting“The challenge with this kind of work is in trying to make it everyone’s story. That can quickly make it no one’s story, and so I like projects that are risky and scary and that aren’t sure-shots.”
— Dee ReesDirecting“I don’t really wanna think about themes, I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won’t be that great […] there’s more potential for it to mean something interesting if I’m not forcing it to mean something I’ve already decided.”
— Wes AndersonDirecting“In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.”
— David FincherDirecting“There is no free lunch, so if you’re playing with the big train set – on big movies – it’s a lot of money they’re entrusting you with, and you have to get that money back for them. I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”
— Jon FavreauDirecting“Don’t show it to somebody until you’re ready to show it to somebody. You only have one opportunity to make a first impression. Put your strongest foot forward.”
— Kasi LemmonsDirecting“When you’re doing films, just with friends, with no money, on a shoestring. You have to be able to do all the jobs… And it’s a wonderful way to learn everything.”
— Christopher NolanDirecting“To me, no matter who you’re casting for what role, if something’s authentic, usually you can mine something good there.”
— Barry JenkinsDirecting“We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion, where you empathize and then you’re frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.”
— Danny BoyleDirecting“I am not here to bring trauma into people’s life so, my job as a director is to conjure the best out of other people within what they have already to work with.”
— Patty JenkinsDirecting“People will forgive pretty much every technical thing before they will forgive bad sound. Your movie could look amazing, but if on every cut, the audio track is popping and making them aware of the cuts, it will pull them out.”
— Ryan CooglerDirecting“I’ve been obsessed with doomsday for a long time – the idea that different cultures respond to it differently, and religions will change people’s outlook on it.”
— Lorene ScafariaDirecting“When you work for other people you’ll find … that they do know what’s best for them, and for the company. And you should listen to them and be respectful, but they don’t know what’s best for you.”
— Mike JudgeDirecting“I’ve been very fortunate. Some people might call me a hard head, but I’m not going to let other people dictate to me who I should be or the stories I should tell. That doesn’t register with me.”
— Spike LeeDirecting“If you wanna do a film where you have a big scope, you’ve got to make your characters relatable and genuine.”
— Jennifer LeeDirecting“Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.”
— Paul Thomas AndersonDirecting“If I could boil it down to one thing… never ask permission to make movies. There’s no reason why you have to be asking permission to do your work.”
— Christopher McQuarrieDirecting“The advice I would give to any director is that you should act. A lot of directors spend a lot of time getting very good at technical things and imagining things visually, but they’ve never really learned how to direct a scene… It doesn’t matter how good a shot looks, the lifeblood, the thing that people will connect to, is these people.”
— Greta GerwigDirecting“You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don’t make it for anyone else.”
— Jordan PeeleDirecting“I’m quite optimistic, but I feel we do need more female producers, more female cinematographers and such, just to make a better working environment among predominantly male film crews.”
— Mary HarronDirecting“Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.”
— Todd HaynesDirecting“We need Storytelling. Otherwise, life just goes on and on like the number Pi.”
— Ang LeeDirecting“The movie is not only about what story you’re telling and who you’re looking at. It’s mostly about how you’re telling it and how you’re looking at it.”
— Celine SciammaDirecting“My favorite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favorite stories, characters, and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I’ve made it.”
— Bong Joon-hoDirecting“A documentary filmmaker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.”
— Chloe ZhaoDirecting“The lies are in the dialogue, the truth is in the visuals.”
— Kelly ReichardtDirecting“When I started writing the script, I realized that I hadn’t really seen any film with a black couple that was worthy of Romeo and Juliet…And through Ada and Souleiman I wanted to relate a similar kind of tragic love, in the age of rampant capitalism.”
— Mati DiopDirecting“So I feel a responsibility to help first-time filmmakers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens.”
— Walter SallesDirecting“My advice for anyone wanting to direct is that nobody is going to hand you an opportunity. You have to create your own opportunities and not take no for an answer.”
— Marielle HellerDirecting“The questions I want to ask will revolve around humans, connection, relationships, family, and stories – what are the stories we tell ourselves and each other?”
— Lulu WangDirecting“I feel like there’s more of a need to tell more optimistic stories.”
— Eliza HittmanDirecting“If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn’t pass that up when it comes your way.”
— Regina KingDirecting“I started making films for myself and embracing the craft of filmmaking again. Consequently, my work got so much better.”
— Chinonye ChukwuDirecting“There’s still a 1950s view of cinema, that there’s one audience and they all want to see the same thing.”
— Michael WinterbottomDirecting“I would tell filmmakers: ‘Don’t just be seduced by the same old, same old. There are interesting things you can explore that may get your film out there to audiences better than the traditional distribution mechanisms.”
— Alex GibneyDirecting“In a kid’s film, you go through the full range of human emotions…You’re scared, you’re excited, you laugh, you’re joyous, you’re sad. It’s exactly what she aims to capture.”
— Josephine DeckerDirecting“As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.”
— Ira SachsDirecting“Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me.”
— Robert RedfordDirecting“I feel that as a writer and as a performer too. I never really thought about the backstory for characters. It was much more of a musical approach: You learn a melody, and then you sing it, I suppose, or you find a rhythm or a cadence that works for the material. And then it’s sort of about hitting that note correctly and finding those beats.”
— Brady CorbetDirecting“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and make a movie of any kind at all.”
— Stanley KubrickDirecting“You’re learning as you’re going, as a director, and each movie is its own entity.”
— Chris BuckDirecting“Cinema is not only about making people dream. It’s about changing things and making people think.”
— Nadine LabakiDirecting“I wanted to make gritty independent films that explored the same issues the movies that I looked up to when I was a teenager: coming of age, trauma, what it meant to live in really confusing situations. Of course, you try to figure out your world narratively.”
— Bing LiuDirecting“I think what you need to search for in films is the integrity of the image. I wanted to make films with solid images that confront the spectator.”
— Alice RohrwacherDirecting“Movies don’t have to impress everyone the moment that it drops. Stuff can take its time to find its audience.”
— Cathy YanDirecting“The one thing that helps me construct the film […] is the places, actually, […] places have a soul […] and I don’t even know what’s going to be in the scenes, I just know I want them to be here, and it gives me a frame.”
— Mia Hansen-LoveDirecting“Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.”
— Mira NairDirecting“Movies don’t look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody’s character right, and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it’s creating a puzzle.”
— Nancy MeyersDirecting“I would travel down to hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.”
— Werner HerzogDirecting“When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films’.”
— Quentin TarantinoDirecting“The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.”
— Peter JacksonDirecting“Filmmaking can give you everything, but at the same time, it can take everything from you.”
— Alejandro Gonzalez InarrituDirecting“To be a filmmaker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.”
— Danny BoyleDirecting“I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I’m dreaming for a living.”
— Steven SpielbergDirecting“If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a pretty clear idea of what was going on.”
— Alfred HitchcockDirecting“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
— Orson WellesDirecting“I love movies with spectacle, but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn’t have to be a creature.”
— J.J. AbramsDirecting“Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.”
— Steven SpielbergDirecting“Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.”
— Doug LimanDirecting“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable to others.”
— Orson WellesDirecting“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
— Alfred HitchcockDirecting“If you compromise what you’re trying to do a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you’re suddenly really far away from where you’re trying to go.”
— Spike JonzeDirecting“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
— Orson WellesDirecting“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but somebody has to.”
— David FincherDirecting“As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.”
— J.J. AbramsDirecting“All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that’s why it takes so long.”
— Steven SpielbergDirecting“I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there’s got to be a captain.”
— Ridley ScottDirecting“Self-plagiarism is style.”
— Alfred HitchcockDirecting“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
— Orson WellesDirecting