Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotes

I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I'm shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That's not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you're composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.

I think a first-time director always has to convince a lot of people that they're ready to do it.

He wasn't directing it, of course, so I didn't work with Hitchcock.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

Eventually, everyone said, Why don't you direct? It would save time. And that's how it started.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

I'm not really a director for hire. You read these scripts and go, 'This is a really great script, but Paul Greengrass would make this so much better than me.' I usually say, 'I know who would be good for this. It's not me.'

I would consider directing. I think directing myself would be tough, but I'm definitely interested in directing. I might start off directing a play before I move to a film.

You seldom get that in film where you're lucky if you get any say at all in the final cut.

I've certainly worked with really great directors who haven't acted.

There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people's minds.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

I've worked with a lot of directors who really don't have a sense of what the hell they want.

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

There are a lot of directors out there who are very specific, visual craftsmen, and while I have the utmost respect for that, they don't really communicate with the actors.

You know, episodic TV directing is a very long and arduous job. You have very short schedules, short short shooting days, and you have to get lot of pages done.

You never hear of a live-action studio that has been making so-so films looking over at a studio that's making great movies and going, 'Oh, we see the difference - we're using a different camera.'

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

Stunt coordinating is a good training ground for directing because you have exposure to all the departments in film.

And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.

I think I would like directing. I really like coming at the work that way.

I want to work with great directors. I've picked films based on the script or the character and seen them collapse because the directors were not strong visionaries.

I enjoy editing when I'm directing, but when someone else is directing, that's their film to cut.

I've heard directing talked about as being a benign dictatorship, and I think that's probably the best way a director should be. They're open to collaboration and feedback from people, but ultimately, it's got to be that one person's vision. That's what I think makes a film really stand out.