Directors on their Craft

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach." - Alfred Hitchcock



"There was always part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro." - Martin Scorsese


"My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way? What if we tried it that way?' That's a terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for a director. So I became a director." - David Mamet

"You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it, and if it lasts through the years, we'll see." - Oliver Stone

"I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies."  - Sean Penn

"You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies and I couldn't find anybody to deliver it correctly." - Albert Brooks

"The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has." - François Truffaut

"The kindest thing a director can do is to look with open eyes at everything." - Alexander Payne

"The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to make a good or bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one." - Alfonso Cuaron

"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 Bigelow

"I have a feeling, a gut feeling, that I'll be making pretty good movies the rest of my life." - Paul Thomas Anderson

"For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put their makeup on." - Jane Campion

"A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashioned values." - Steven Spielberg

"The first work of the director is to set a mood so that the actor's work can take place, so that the actor can create. And in order to do that, you have to communicate, communicate with the actors. Direction is about communication on all levels." - William Friedkin

"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 Crowe

"I believe that filmmaking - as, probably is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards and all your dice and whatever else you've got. So each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should and I think everyone should do everything that way." - Francis Ford Coppola

"A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do." - Elia Kazan

"I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful." - Spike Lee

"A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet." - Orson Welles

"Usually when I'm making a movie, what I have in mind first for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how can we make a world for the story that the audience hasn't quite been in before." - Wes Anderson

"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?" - Tim Burton

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To close, my favorite line ever from a director about making moves...

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it. And one day you die. That is all there is to it." - John Huston