Dennis Farina Quotes

The point of having a director is that they make the final decision; it's their point of view, they set the rhythm and they make the final decisions.

One of the gratuities about being a director is that you can volunteer yourself out of difficult details.

Directors never give you anything.

I would say that the energy on set is always the energy of the director because he's the boss.

When you're the person who's kind of in charge of everything a lot of the time, it's sometimes nice to get bossed around. It's sometimes nice to have somebody say, "This is what I want you to do" and to stretch your abilities.

I had never been in charge of anything. I'd always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I'd never been in charge of an organization.

I don't think I know enough about acting to direct. You need to be a slight megalomaniac, not where you want to take over the world, but where you want to make every single decision and the buck stops with you. It's an awful lot of stress.

When you're the director, you kinda do all the work.

I'm not quite that difficult, even though maybe I'm a little bit bossy. But you know, in order to get things done, you do have to be a little bit bossy sometimes or tell people what you really want. Otherwise, things just don't get done, do they?

Directors are the captains of the ship, and it's your job as the lead actor to make sure that the rest of the cast understand that by doing whatever he says.

Give orders, and do no more, and nothing will get done.

If you want to lead, you have to heed.

I always delegate. If someone is very good at something, whatever it is, he will be in charge.

It doesn't come naturally to me, being the boss and telling people what I want. I find it very taxing and tiring. I love getting to be way down the line in the decision-making chain.

I'm a leader.

Luckily, as a director I can just tell people what I need and I don't need to tell them how to get it.

At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

We were doing Scarface many years ago...and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean. I thought, what's going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director, Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.

As a director myself, you want to have colleagues and collaborators that respect your authority as the director. I'm very comfortable with that, and I've done a lot of work in second unit.

Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

I always used to associate good directors as being ones who are totally extreme and have an answer for everything and there are no loose ends.

We accomplish all that we do through delegation - either to time or to other people.

You've got to listen but you've also got to lead.

Sometimes when you're producing or directing something, and which I've been at fault to do in the past, you find yourself trying to do a portion of everyone else's job because you're just trying to be so in control and you think that you have to be hands on, on absolutely everything. You give your sense, you give your keynote to make sure the DNA is consistent. I think that's all you can really do.

Never delegate. Always empower.