John Frankenheimer Quotes

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

To me, the director is the most important, rather than the story.

When you make a movie, you can only make the movie that you would want to see.

The thing about working with Peter Jackson is that, at the end of the day, he is a passionate artist.

You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.

I have always believed that when a film is being made, it has to be the director's vision.

My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

I think the success of any movie is dependent upon it being a singular vision.

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.

I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

There's been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn't have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can't count the ways a director's vision is compromised.

I'd never directed before and this movie's too important to me to put in the hands of some guy who has never directed. Even if it's me.

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.

I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

Movies are a director's medium, and they end up getting less credit than actors. They get the flak if the movie doesn't do well, and the actor walks away with most of the credit if the film does well.

For John Woo, it is quite difficult to make a movie in Hollywood in his own style. Because Hollywood is based on a producer system, it is difficult for a director to express himself using his own style of filmmaking.

In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.

I've found that the more experts you have on a movie, the less control the director has.

I'm an artist, and I'm part of every decision in a movie.

In film, you have to let go sometimes.

An actor is only a part of the film, not the whole, and very often, he is moulded by the director. That is why a good director can make so much difference to a film.