Dawn Steel Quotes

I think of myself as a cultural filmmaker.

I had become a film director because I thought I could express something in an artful way.

I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director.

I don't make films to reproduce reality.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

It could be sci-fi, love story, historical drama what counts for me is the fact that they're made by great directors with a great point of view who bring the audience to be elevated and at the same time entertained. That's what cinema is.

I've always tried to create music the way Kubrick makes film, just kind of mimicking consciousness. He has a way of mimicking this greater power.

When a director shifts gears as often as does Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the man behind the emotionally rich debut film 'Amores Perros,' you may wonder if he knows what he wants.

Lynne Ramsay's 'Ratcatcher' blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

'Scarface' was a tremendous undertaking, and I'm one of those who really feel that no one could have done it like Brian De Palma.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

I really love Hitchcock; I think he was a complete genius, to me one of the best directors. Such a sense of how to put things together.

There is often a great disparity between a director's personal style and the movies he makes.

I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.

Peter Chelsom and Edgar Wright are totally different directors and worlds apart, but both really accomplished directors who are certain of how they want to make a film.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

I think anything Tony Kaye would've done would've been interesting, definitely. And worth seeing.

I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I'm not going to make a Haneke film. That's just not in my DNA.