Directors quotes
2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside directors — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I love the act of writing. I like the quiet, internal aspect of it. If I lost track of that, I couldn't direct the same way. I couldn't be a director for-hire; it's just not my nature."
"I trust work, directors - I don't live in fear. All good experiences have come from trusting the universe. There is no other way to live or love. Otherwise, you create your own prison."
"I depend on good editors and a good director. It's up to the way they shoot it, the lighting and all that. I like how small you can be on TV."
"I love working with women directors. They don't mind making you cute."
"When I come up against a director who has a concept that I don't agree with, or maybe I just haven't thought of it or whatever, I'd be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor, I want them to have the control, otherwise it's going to become predictably my work, and that's not fun."
"I realized that a lot of the great directors that I admire from [Ingmar] Bergman to [Fredrico] Fellini re always shooting, then going into the editing room, and shooting again."
"I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it."
"The truth of the matter is this - I never look for films specifically, because ultimately if the fundamentals of the character and the script and the director aren't there, it makes it a moot point."
"Every actor you work with has a different method, same with the director. You have to figure out what your shared language is and how to best support each other, and also take care of yourself."
"I adapt to directors, I don't like making directors adapt to me. If I'm with Clint Eastwood then I'll do two takes, if I'm with Fincher I'll do 50 - though the thought of that sounds horrible."
"My main interest in being a director, and the most important thing to me, is that world with the actors."
"I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense."
"The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
"Every actress has a line she'll draw, where she'll say, 'This I will do and this I won't.' For me, everything has to be important to the story and the director has to be able to tell me why."
"There's a kind of unwritten rule: Don't say anything at all, and everything will be fine. It's a producer's medium. The directors aren't there to make any decisions. They're not going to change anything."
"I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director."
"When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots."
"I knew [Jesse Owens'] name, but I really didn't remember what it is he had done, so I felt like I had to get refreshed. So I read the script and I realized like, wow, this is an incredible human being. I told my manager, however I had to do it, let me see the director; I got to play him."
"When I started out modeling, there weren’t casting directors and there weren’t stylists, so you just dealt directly with the designer. We were all much closer back then..."
"What goes on between a father and a son, which is usually such a private matter, is that they are able to be honest with each other, and be honest with me, as a director. Its just remarkable."
