Peter O'Toole Quotes

Actors should never be important. Only directors should have power and place.

You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater.

Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.

That's the great thing about being a director. You have your list of things you have to worry about and things you don't have to worry about. If you can hire someone or cast someone who equates to not having to worry about, it's great!

Financiers don't support their directors to cast properly. They don't have the vision of an artist. They're casting to spreadsheets, and it's making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.

When people finance a movie, they have their own ideas and have things they want to change.

When you see the documentary, you'll see that there were parallels. Michael and I both wanted Daniel Craig, and it was the same as it was for Cubby and Harry when they wanted Sean [Connery]. The studio wanted a star and wanted an American, and wanted this and that, but they determined, "No, it's Sean Connery."

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.

It's always the script first choosing roles. [Then] whoever else is attached. I never like to be the first person attached, because I don't really trust what's going on, unless there's a really good director.

[Adrienne Shelly] explain exactly what she was looking for. This was her movie [Waitress].She also wrote the songs that I sing in it. She wrote everything. She chose the colour of our outfits; she designed the set of the diner. She was very, very involved at every level.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

The only reason an indie gets made is because someone has a burning passion to do it and won't take no for an answer, as opposed to a big film, which is like a train that starts rolling down the tracks and nothing can stop it.

When you have people like Casey [Affleck] and Michelle Williams and they want to do more takes you don't say, "Sorry, that's it." And I also don't like to say, "It's fine, it's great." Unless it's clearly there.

Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.

I thought of myself as part of the general filmmaking effort. And as my scope broadened, I began to think about directing. I wanted to be the guy who got to say whether the dress is red or blue.

I believe in preparation. As you already know we had to deal with many crews, 2 cameras. Also as I said we had to get many different actors because they tried to tamper with the project. I just liked doing the movie how I envisioned it. I wanted it to be my own.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.

I'm very interested in starting to produce, and direct, and have an umbrella over an entire project in the future. I'd like to have control over what the characters do. I think as an actor, you get a little too caught up in the moment-to-moment, beat-to-beat stuff to have perspective.

I'm always involved with casting my movies. I have final word on it.

I will never lose anything that an audience will miss.I turned things that were scripted as effects into in-camera stuff, which is sexier.

I don't think I'd ever want to direct. I don't think I have as much discipline to direct as I would like to have, and I don't want my hair color to not go grey during that process.

Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you're creating and writing it, or sometimes you're writing and directing it, or other times you're there from the very beginning.

When you make a movie, it's just a huge bureaucracy because movies cost so much money. Millions of people get involved, and pretty soon the creative idea gets tramped on and watered down or filtered through a huge system.

One of the things you have to understand with The Room, I never approached a studio to produce, because I know no one in Hollywood will produce this. I came to Hollywood and I said "I will produce this movie the way I want it."

As far as producing, once we started shooting, I soon realized where the critical decisions about the movies were really being made, and it wasn't on the set. They were being made in the production meetings. That's where producing a movie happens. And that's where I wanted to be. I didn't just want to be a piece, a pawn being played. I wanted to take part in the creative process, and that's how I sort of got introduced to the idea.