I've been really lucky not to have a duff experience with a director.
In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.
I'm an international director.
For 'The Book Thief,' I wanted only one outcome, and that was for the director to follow his own vision, just as I had.
I'm not particularly needy, and I'm not particularly anxious. I don't look for a director to tell me I'm doing a good job or that I'm great. I don't need to be stroked. It's more my own yardstick.
Meeting with the director is an audition.
It's a very tricky relationship, the cinematographer and the director as a woman.
Really, it's the director's job to disappear and allow the movie to just feel.
I like to write, and I would love to be a screenwriter one day and a director.
Lucio Fulci is such a massively underrated director. Everyone knows him as the Godfather of Gore.
I started my career as an actor, but I've been a director for 15 years now.
For me, the most exciting thing is that Jane Campion is a woman we can all really look up to. She doesn't have the body of work that some other directors do - no woman director does - but her work is so consistently original, wonderful, masterful.
I was trained to serve the writer and director as an actor before I serve myself. Not to say that's gotten in my way, but that's a different way of working than most American actors work.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.
To be an actor is to be ambiguous in every form, which is a very hard way to live. You represent desire: the desire of the director and the desire of the audience, even if it's a subconscious desire. If a director is to work with you for two months, he must be in love with you in some way or another.
The main issue when it comes to hiring someone from Asia is the language barrier. It's difficult to book someone when they don't speak the language and they can't deliver the lines or even speak to the director. But in terms of Asian-American actresses, we all speak it fluently!
Every different director has another language - for instance, Hitchcock does not like any bright color ever, unless the story says 'there goes the girl in a red dress.'
As a director, there's no natural career progression. So after 'The Wackness,' which was very personal to me, I was very, very picky about what I was going to do next, to the point where I think that I was almost too picky.
It causes havoc on set anytime a director wants to go backward rather than forward.
A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.
I have been an art director, a book designer, a book-jacket designer and an interior designer.
I don't think I could have made a good movie out of 'Thor 2' because I wasn't the right director. And I don't think I would have been in the running for 'Wonder Woman' as a result. And that's one of the reasons why I'm glad I didn't do it.
Jose Padilha is a wonderful director.
I hope the next actress offered millions to play the 'fat girl for the day' stops to think about this before she signs the contract - even if just to ask, like any professional actress would in any other situation, 'Why does she weigh 350 pounds? And why me for the part?' If the director can't answer these questions, don't do the movie.
I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.
When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.
Sucking up to a director means you are unsure of your talents. I'm not.
That was the most important thing to me: making sure 'Gardner Elliot' was likeable and funny and interesting. I took my time before filming to chat with Peter, the director, to create this character.
It's always nice working with friends. And if you have a director that you've worked with before, you don't have to go through that first learning thing. There's an element of trust there.
Robert de Niro has always been fascinating to me. And if John Cazale were still alive, that would be a man I'd love to work with. I'm a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson's films - I would be honored to work with him. I think he's a brilliant director, and he gets such compelling stories out of his actors and out of his crew.
Do we want a back door in an iPhone where the government can go in to track movements if they have probable cause? I know the director of the FBI and local law enforcement want that capability.
When I make a movie, I don't break it down and analyze it. I could but it would get in the way of doing a job - on instinct based on all the research we did going in. you want to trust yourself and your director and your acting partners in the circumstances you're shooting. I don't like to have any kind of overview.
I'm the girl that waits for the director to say, 'I like that,' or 'Can you boost it up?,' or 'Can you pull it down?' I'm that kind of actor. I started in theater, so that's the feedback that I'm accustomed to. It's the feedback that I really thrive off of.
When I was a kid it was much more difficult. You're trying to understand what the director wants. It's a learning process. Now, you go in and it's more of a collaboration.
I'm not the kind of director who imposes his processes on everybody else.