Wong Kar-wai Quotes

I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

If it were all in the script, why make the film?

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

By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.

I think it's counterproductive for actors to come to the set with well-thumbed copies of the book their film is adapted from.

When you write and direct your own film, you basically know exactly what you want. Or you hope to. For the studio, it actually can make life a little easier, because if you have a bunch of questions, they only need to call one person.

I don't believe in development. I believe in pre-pre-production, so when I sit down with an idea for a movie, I'm thinking I'm going to make this film. I don't think about anything else.

Making 'Caddyshack' was like an exercise in controlled chaos.

There is certainly no formula of making a successful film, but there are means to make a sensible film.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

Though I have an idea about the climax, it always changes when we start shooting.

I definitely had some heated but extremely productive chats with screenwriter Justin Monjo, but while it's my story, it's their movie, so I have to allow for compression and poetic license.

You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.

Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing.

Making a movie is like a chess game. It's about constantly changing patterns, adapting to new things. It's not just black and white, as you know.

Once you are shooting a movie, even if it's your own script, you have to let it go at a certain point. That's true for every film. It breaks up into phases where the thing that you have in front of you is the thing you have to address, and you can't worry about what you imagined a scene was going to like and that it came out differently, because that's what you have to make work.

As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important. However, you have to go by the script because it's related to production, otherwise you will not finish your project. My background are acting, film production, directing, and I studied them for many years. Keep in mind that you need many other skills when you are starting any film project related to real life.

I'm planning some films in the U.K., and it will have pros and cons. It takes a lot more time to set up a film in the U.K., because you can't rely on much. In Greece, friends show up and bring what they can and you make the film. Well, that's a bit simpler than how it really is. But when you make a film with proper industries, it takes more time to synch all these things.

My process differs... my process for a Richard Linklater film is very different than a process for Training Day.

The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

I went to London to do the stuff. I was like "What am I going to do? What's going to happen?" But then once you start working, you forget all that and you start enjoying what you're doing. Once you enjoy the process, you know that people are going to do the same thing. If you don't enjoy it and just do it like a job, then it's going to be feel that way. That's my theory of doing a movie.

I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered.

I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.

Every film is difficult. Making films, you're always going to have problems, there's always going to be challenges.