Mira Nair Quotes

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

To make 'Sound of My Voice,' we had to conceive the entire world and understand it holistically. If you want to show less in a movie, you've got to figure out more.

You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

Luck, I never looked to make difficult movies on purpose. You make the films you can make.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it.

I just see myself as a guy who's trying to make a film or, make art.

Music runs through everything I do - I even think musically; even when I was acting, but, especially, when I am directing. Directing is very musical.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

I definitely managed to do different kinds of things. My focus is usually who the director is, because at the end of the day the director is the storyteller, what the movie is all about. I don't want to participate in something that I don't think is constructive storytelling.

I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.