Madeleine Stowe Quotes

It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.

Making a film is so scary, and there's such a kind of void that you're working from initially. I mean, you can have all the ideas and be as prepared as possible, but you're also still bringing people together and saying, 'Trust me,' even when you don't necessarily trust every element.

I'm new to this TV thing, at least as an actor. It's a challenge. The thing I have to adjust to is the changing directors every week. That's new for me. I tend to establish with a director - and then two days later, he's gone.

There are films that look very interesting when on paper, but things change while shooting. At times, things changed during post-production, and I see no reason to blame anything on anyone. It is a collaborative effort. If it failed, we should face it.

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.

When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.

When I was on set I tried not to bug Steven Soderbergh too much. "Why did you put the camera there?" But he was very open to my questions and definitely being on his set was really thrilling because he's such a master.

I'm a director's actor, and I surrender myself to the vision and the process. I think nothing else matters then.

The concept of making a movie in which the director dictates is kind of exotic - and absolutely not truthful. Directing means allowing a great deal of collaboration and listening and having the ability to change your mind.

I feel that I don't know anything, I don't know how to act, but I can surrender myself to a director I respect and love. I feel very lucky to be a part of their visions.

I do a film only when I feel I will be comfortable with the set-up and other members of the team.

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.

I always go crazy over every scene and have to discuss it with my director many times. Even Sekhar Kammula, who directed me in 'Fidaa,' knows this.

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

'Bahubali' did not happen overnight. The producer Shobhu Yarlagadda, Prabhas, and I kept talking and discussing and imagining.

If you ever want to be interrogated, get Michael Shannon to do it. He's an amazing man. I loved working with him.

The key relationship for writers in film is producers, because those are the first two people involved and the ones who work on it intensely in a private way without the big machinery of film.

As filmmakers, you're not working on just one project, you're producing something, directing something, shooting something, and so it becomes hard to do it by yourself.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance -- and a whole lot of luck.

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change.

My world was changing, and I was not ready for it.

The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies.

I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.