My first day on the set of 'John Adams', I was just supposed to fly to Virginia for a costume fitting. But the director figured, why not shoot it, too? So they threw me into a dress that didn't fit, gave me lines I hadn't seen, in a dialect I didn't know, and two screaming, arching infants.
Acting is the work of two people - it's only possible when you have the complicity, the help, even the manipulation of a director.
For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.
My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.
Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.
And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.
The shift for me, after spending a long time trying to take existing projects and bring them to fruition as a director for hire, is going back to where I started as a self-generating director. After trying and failing to get so many things made, I have decided that you've just got to do something you really, really love.
Larry Kasdan is a great director.
By the time I got to be director of product management at Thomas-Conrad, I was in a better negotiating position, as I had accumulated more accomplishments and gained a reputation for having a great work ethic.
When I was very young I wanted to be a professional horseback rider. Then I wanted to be a pop singer. Then I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Then I wanted to be a movie director.
Every director is so different from every other one.
When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.
The standard rumor at the time was that Rumsfeld, as chief of staff, had persuaded President Ford to appoint George H.W. Bush as director of Central Intelligence, assuming that that got rid of a potential competitor for the presidency.
Being a director, whether you're in rehearsal or you're in auditions or you're in a creative meeting, is so much to me about being present in the moment. There's a sense of time stopping.
Especially as a director on 'West Wing,' I directed a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and really stretched my wings.
As a director, try to be humble and not to overdo it, not overcoverage and over-covering the scene.
I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary.
'Brotherhood of the Wolf' is a very important movie because it represents something new. The director Christophe Gans came up with the idea of taking a French legend and making it some kind of really strange, almost Chinese action movie. The result is something that I haven't seen anywhere before.
It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a wonderful story.
And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you've got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime.
I am not a director or a writer, but a filmmaker.
A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.
David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.
The point of having a director is that they make the final decision; it's their point of view, they set the rhythm and they make the final decisions.
I don't really care where I work, actually, because you know making a movie is like living in movie world. There's such a secluded world, and the director is the king ruling the country, and everybody's building this little town to speak in symbolism.
I've always wanted to write movies - I always used to tell my mom that I wanted to be a director.
As a director he was not that interested in Vader.
I don't think of myself as a director or writer. I think of myself as a filmmaker.
I don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.
When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.
You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
Nick gets carsick if he's not driving - plus, he's basically a walking atlas. He can drive around any city without a map, which works out fine for me because I just become our entertainment director and pick out which audio book we'll listen to next.
When I worked on Altar Boys, they wanted to see us having fun. The four of us would have fun on set and steal each other's lines, and mess with the director.
The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being.