Browsing Topic Best Filmmaker Quotes

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.

Every Black filmmaker you love, has at least 10 projects that he can’t get made in Hollywood. Sequels that fans scream for, don’t get made because of the system in place. The world is missing out and it’s a shame cause the money is there 10 folds.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

When we bring the filmmaker, we bring somebody to help us elevate the material with those things, to help us do something different with all of those resources at their disposal.

Filmmakers are anxious about what other people are working on.

Filmmakers tell actors to adjust their body language, and the famous presence of the actor is his or her body language. That is what makes them special and a movie star. An actor’s capital is his body.

I never heard Coen brothers get defensive, ever. You get with these filmmakers doing the hardest work in the world, and they’re not defensive. They’re happy together, they crack jokes together, they have different opinions – and it doesn’t bother them that they have different opinions. So no wonder their work is so good, because you’re getting two for the price of one.

I’m proud of the way I rearrange and put things together, like a chef who makes a great meal, or a filmmaker who puts together a story – it’s casting, editing, cinematography.

Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it.

True change is a long game, and it remains to be seen if this is change. We’ve had years before where there have been great years for filmmakers and performers of color, LGBTQ filmmakers and performers, women.

I think the thing about film is, as it gets proved by a lot of young filmmakers now, that the medium will just go on reinventing itself, and so you just hope to be a part of that and not a part of some kind of endless regurgitation or ‘Here I am doing what you know I do’ kind of thing.

Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.

I love making films. I’m happiest when I’m doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing.

When I work with filmmakers today, I’m really an advocate for the women’s roles that I see, to make them as layered and as deep as possible. I think many of them are underwritten.

To me, not every black filmmaker who is making black films is trying to make black cinema.

As for major obstacles keeping young Latinos from becoming filmmakers, I think our communities are still coming into their identities as storytellers. It’s such an important identity to reclaim – it’s how our ancestors kept our cultures alive. But a long history of silencing, invisibility, and marginalization has kept generations of Latinos from believing in themselves, from seeing themselves as agents of their own lives. I think there needs to be a focus on this aspect to help cultivate young Latinas to see themselves as cultural producers and defenders.

I thing for female filmmakers a big issue is making their second and third films. You see the statistics, and the dropoff on the second and third [films] , are dire.

I understand when there’s no money for the arts in the government, but it should maybe pressure private companies to support more filmmakers. These exhibition and distribution companies are huge, and there might be incentives for them to invest more in Mexican cinema.

The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting

There’s a rumbling with young artists and young filmmakers that are dying to get different points of view, different stories, out there. It’s all changing and happening and they’re able to maybe not play their movies in theaters but get them on the internet. This is the new wave, the new world.

There’s a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.

Iranian filmmakers are not passive. They fight whenever they can, as creative expression means a lot to them. The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it’s sunny, the next day it’s raining. You just have to hope you walk out into the sunshine.

I’m a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn’t understand what was going on with every single ingredient, I could be qualifying for, like, the lunch food job at my daughter’s school.

I wanted to be a real writer, you can put it this way, but I was lazy. So I thought that cinema would be funnier because it’s collective, and it’s crazy, and it’s chaotic, and also because I was based in Spain. So I said it will be easy to make a career of that – because all the other filmmakers there are very bad. And it will be funny at the same time. So this was the point. It will be funnier, easier, and maybe at the end there will be some unknown beauty, and maybe on the way we’ll create the dream that a different logic is possible for life.

Well, I mean, the original is certainly the jump-off, it certainly is what it is, you know, I grew up around that era so I watched all those shows. The basic concept is there, it’s just a different movie. Totally different actors, different filmmakers, different script, but same concept.

I think we’re in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it’s anybody’s guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That’s what’s so exciting about the time we’re in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.

It’s always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone’s seen the last one.

Somewhere along the line we stopped believing we could do anything. And if we don’t have our dreams, we have nothing.

To pretend like Hollywood is anything other than that is disingenuous. #OscarsSoWhite is trendy, but for women filmmakers and filmmakers of color, it’s not a trend. This is our reality, and it’s important that we do something to change it.

There’s obviously something that feels very good about being with a new filmmaker who’s very excited, but I also think there’s something very comforting in a director who’s been around a few times. Both have their pros and cons.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.