Adrian Lyne Quotes

You don't have to get it right the first time.

I'm not trying to prove myself a great filmmaker. I don't know much about filmmaking anyway. I'm trying my hand at it to see if I'm any good.

I don't really know what I'm doing, to be honest. I come up with things, and maybe it works, and maybe it doesn't, and I try to learn from my castmates and director and from everyone.

Every time I do a play, it's as if I've never done one before. I'm always confused. I always am convinced I'm going to be fired. I'm like, 'I don't remember how to act. I don't know how to do this.' And, it's just a very slow process, and then, all of a sudden, it's just there one day. I still don't understand how it happens.

Everybody has to learn for the first time.

I always think that you finish one movie, you start a new one, and you think, 'OK. I did that last one. Now I've learned. I know how this works.' Then by the end of the movie, you think, 'No, I don't, really.'

As an actor, you have an accumulated knowledge base. But there's also something about it that every time you really feel like you're doing it for the first time; you have no idea whether you're capable of it.

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

You learn something every time you make a mistake.

Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

I realised years ago that no one really knows what they're doing and you kind of just learn by observing.

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

When you're experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.

I'm still learning. It's all a learning curve. Every time you sit down, with any given episode of any given show, it is a learning curve. You're learning something new about how to tell a story. But then, I've felt that way about everything I've ever done - television, features or whatever. Directing or writing, it always feels like the first day of school to me.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

I feel like every time I write a song, it feels like the first time I wrote a song. It's just as hard; it doesn't get easier, but that's why I love it: because it's a challenge every time. I also feel like I'm learning new ways.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

It's very funny because every time I make a movie, and I've heard this re-echoed by other filmmakers and actors I have worked with, you kind of feel like you're naked again. You have to figure it all out from scratch, as if you had never done it before.

I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I've never been much of a craftsman, in an educated way. But I think just the experience of writing makes the avenues I follow a little more efficient in some ways. At the same time, when you're young, you're a little more fearless, and there's less of an internal critic.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.