Ed Helms Quotes

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement.

Directing is a tremendous art.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

The challenge of film is making it right there at that moment, and then you get to move on.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

You ought to have a perspective when you're making a film.

There's always the pressure on the director of how to transition from one scene to another, especially when it can really be oblique on 'Game of Thrones.'

I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

I've seen so many young filmmakers - even professional filmmakers who get a Hollywood deal - they don't quite know where to begin, where to end, and they'll waste a lot of time making this perfect shot, an establishing shot, and then there's no time left to shoot the dialogue.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

During script narrations, if I feel the screenplay mood jumping abruptly, I tell the director, and they work on it.

Here's the thing about standup directing: not that hard. As I said on Twitter one day, or maybe it was Instagram - sorry, I want to keep my platforms straight - it's essentially the same five shots over and over again. Seven if you're ambitious.

In films, you have to follow the director's vision. Filmmaking is a director's medium. So everything happens as per the script and his vision.

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat.

Pictures are written, acted, directed, photo­graphed, edited, scored and all that. The screenwriter determines what scenes are in and what scenes are out; decides whether that bit of information is dramatized or just referred to; whether it takes place on or off screen. There are millions of decisions made by the screenwriter.

When you are acting in a film, you have no idea what scene the editor is going to choose. For instance, after you have directed, you feel more comfortable delivering a performance. Because you know the real performance is put together in the editing room.

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

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.

That shot in "Into the Inferno" somehow popped up while my editor and I were viewing the footage. I immediately said, "That looks like the opening shot because the camera approaches the action very slowly and we have enough time to insert some of the main credits into it." So it was a practical choice. At the same time, you see these tiny figures standing at the rim of something, and all of a sudden, the camera rises further and you find yourself looking straight down into an inferno.

The Coen brothers: Of all the directors I've worked with, they're the only ones who have given me the storyboards attached to the script. It was very cool for me, because I knew when I was in close-up or if it was far away, and it also made me know that anything that happened in the edit wasn't personal. Because they edit their own movies, so they were editing it as they went.

It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.