Abbas Kiarostami Quotes

A director is what a director wants to be. If you want to force something, you can fight to the death and maybe get fired, but it's your job to help push things along.

Sometimes directors feel like they have to justify that hat that they are wearing they've got on as a director, and they come in and they tweak and interfere.

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

Film work can be very interesting, but it also can be awfully boring because who creates the film? The actors? No. It is the director. It's his piece of work.

I produce the way I would love to be produced: In ways to create the best conditions to make your movie, but also to create a space in which the director calls the shots.

I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.

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

I didn't feel compromised as an actor, and allowed other people's fingerprints all over that aspect.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

I can count on one hand the directors who actually directed me.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

I think there's a tendency with actor/directors to imagine themselves playing every part and trying to get people to follow their rhythm, their tempo, their pace. I've learned now to just love being at the center of this creative swirl.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

I'm worried a lot of our work day as artists is a producer's creation - not an artist's creation.

It's weird talking about the album as a living being with its own thoughts and direction, especially if you're the one creating it.

It is difficult to make movies on your own terms and also to make a film and convince somebody to have faith in it.

I think everything that I've done, I've been involved with for longer. Either you develop it from scratch, or you take something, and you develop it, and you work on the script, but I'm not sure how good I'd be at just sort of taking a piece of material and being a director for hire like that.

Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It's abandoned or it's ripped out of your hands, and it's thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It's a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, "That's exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I'm going to put it out there."

I certainly like the actor to have as much lee-way as possible. In the same way that director Bong was generous enough to let me create, you have to do that for actors, as well, and let them use the tools they have, and part of that is their own brains and their own words.

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.

I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

I really love the experience of moving things around, in terms of being a director.

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.