Duncan Jones Quotes

I think that, again, filmmaking is the director's medium in the end, and the best thing a producer can do is stay out of the way and support the director one hundred percent.

As a director and filmmaker, I love creating my own opportunity, and getting to share the love, in that way, by creating other opportunities for people that I admire, so that they can do something in a way they haven't done it before.

I practice the artist's golden rule. I wouldn't want somebody telling me how to finish my painting, I'm not going to tell him how to finish his movie or how to shape his movie.

It's a lot of fun to be a part of films that you don't exactly know how they're going to turn out.

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

Kubrick ate it up. He loved it. He just let me go crazy.

I love my work, apart from when it's driving me crazy. But I get to be interested in stuff and think like a filmmaker as I'm buzzing about the world and then see an opportunity to make a film, and then make it happen.

I'm an actor first and foremost. My producing credentials are just to say, 'Yeah, I love this story and now let's bring the people, the ensemble together,' and I get out of the way. I have no desire to check on schedules and shooting schedules and money and stuff like that.

When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

Every director's so different. Everybody has their own modus operandi and I love getting to know different directors in the way they work. David O. Russell is very exciting to be with because he's got a mind like quicksilver.

The great thing about movies is that they're collaborative. And the worst thing is that they're collaborative.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

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

I truly believe that cinema is a collaborative effort, and as long as I get to tell, and be part of, interesting stories and work with genuine people, I don't see any project as a 'risk.'

Working with Subhash Ghai is always a different experience. Subhashji is my mentor. I'm always glad to work with him.

Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don't.

Filmmaking is hard. I mean, it's not that hard, but it is hard to find your way through a system because there's a lot of people, there's money, there's a big machine to kind of make it - and how to find methods and processes that allow it to continue to be a lively process and a creative process.

Jeph Loeb has been great to work with, and he's been really supportive of some really bizarre ideas I've had.

While doing 'Ghazi,' Sankalp said he wanted me for his next film. He is a genius. There is always a mini-war going on in his brain, though he is a reticent person.

People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged - and in a lot of ways, they are - but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected.

I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.