Filmmaking Quotes

When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

Transform into your dream.

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.

Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.

Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film.

It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect

Greatness is achieved through kindness, compassion, and love.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism – use to it terminate misogyny – use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness.

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!

To make a real independent film where the filmmaker is in charge creatively, one must sacrifice personal, financial, and physical well-being.