Derek Cianfrance Quotes

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

For seven years, I made films in the cinema verite tradition - photographing what was happening without manipulating it. Then I realised I wanted to make things happen for myself, through feature films.

With acting, there's a certain amount of independence you have within the framework of the storytelling. When it's done well, it's a collaborative medium.

Stylistically, in improv, I don't think you can have as many camera tricks; I think you're kind of shooting more like a documentary: you don't know where it's going, so you have to hang back a little more.

When you hire Sam Jackson, he'll figure out the character, and he'll figure out the character's look, and he'll provide it to you. With Sam Jackson, you basically yell 'action', you go get a sandwich, and you come back and yell 'cut.'

When you go to set, they just go, 'OK, let's see what you guys do!' The camera moves around what you initially feel.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them. It feels dishonest to be pulling back in that opening shot and leading him to his destiny.

We are not documentarians, we are filmmakers.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

Acting is all I know; being on a set is all I know.

In the theater, you go from point A to point Z, building your performance as the evening progresses. You have to relinquish that control on a film.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

Many times, when a director reads a script and wants somebody who says 'Far out', then they let me do what I want with it and that's usually more interesting for an actor.

I don't storyboard, and I don't really shot list. I let the shots be determined by how the actors and I figure out the blocking in a scene, and then from there, we cover it.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.

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

The first feature film I did, when I did 'Night Shift,' I improvised quite a bit because I would improvise at the audition, so sometimes I would return to the original lines, and then when I was on set, I would improvise even more.

The longer I've been doing this, the more I've realized that you have no idea what kinds of roles are possible for you - dream roles can take you by surprise. That being said, I need to play Hamlet one day. I'd also love to be in a play that I have written myself.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

I was in the movies. I danced, I sang, I learned to work in front of a camera. It was like being in a repertory company.

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

And in 'Frisco Kid' and in 'The Woman in Red' I had to ride badly. Then you have to really ride well in order to ride badly.

A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

I acted in a couple friends's short films and thought I was gonna be really good and mysterious and sexy. And I was just terrible and self-aware.