Nicholas Stoller Quotes

You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.

There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room.

It's true that I don't think I'd be a good director. If I were a director, I'd try to hire the best people I could and then leave them alone. I don't know much about cameras or lighting, so I'd make sure that I had a really good cameraman who understood lenses and lighting, and I say to him, "This is the scene we have to shoot and this is what I think it should be, you go do it." Same with actors. But really, very good directors who know everything do basically the same thing. They hire you and then they leave you alone.

If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

I don't know much about making films or TV programs, but what's cool about being in the studio is that you have more time.

'Flip' is an anthology of four short films, and I am in the one called 'Massage,' along with Sandeepa Dhar and Viraj Patel.

For me, every film is like the first picture. I am very choosy with the director and producer.

The writing of 'The Ladykillers' was fun. But once it goes out of your hands it's not fun, 'especially for someone who is used to being hands-on like me.

A filmmaker has to have faith in talent.

Making a film is a very difficult thing to do, but the experience of 'Best F(r)iends' is a great memory.

When you make an album, you have a team of musicians you work with; when you're a director and you're creating a motion picture, it's a much bigger animal.

A lot of hard work goes into making a film. It's not all fun time, as people tend to think. There are always stereotypes attached to every profession, but I found out this industry breaks them all.

I don't have much patience as I really like to work a lot and it is really hard to work a lot in movies because you have to have patience - every movie is a huge test of patience.

To get the film in your head on the screen, first you have to take it out of your head and explain it to everyone who is working with you. This will take work and planning.

Moviemaking is a dirty, tiring affair. The joy comes from the possibility to be free on set and really let loose.

I like to produce my own movies.

Making a film - particularly what I think is a good film - is the result of a team of people, and the end result has many, many hands on it.

When you're working in cinema, you often have a very, very compressed schedule - very few weeks to just kind of go through that whole process of reflection and refining - and it has to be done.

I'm doing a music video for a group called 'Die Antwoord.' That's fun, but yeah, I'm trying to get a live-action film off the ground, and that could take anywhere from a few months to the rest of my life.

When you are writing and directing and producing, there is a lot of stuff to do. I like to finish one; then while I am editing, I will think of the next one.

At the end of the day, making 'Monster' was unbelievably hard, as making any movie is. And the only thing that made it worth it is not those awards and all those kind of things that I can barely remember because I was so overwhelmed. It was really that night in the editing room, that day on set. It was those things.

As an actor, I can only do my job well, but in a movie there are a lot of other things that matter too - like how it is edited and promoted and the works. Those are not in my hand.

HBO spends almost a month perfecting an episode. They shoot at the same speed that you would shoot a major motion picture, and they give you all of the things that you need to succeed. They really do support their artists.