Simon McBurney Quotes

As a director, I'm not the one animating every frame, every shot. I'm moving around like a surgeon on rounds, or a farmer checking in on all the plants being grown, pruning and adjusting. For me, it's a very exciting job.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I can't do a film after having debated it. I am unable to do a film while discussing it with my team. I issue directives. I do not achieve it otherwise.

I'm a designer, producer and I am hands-on for every project I undertake. The creative side of what I do is really something I think people overlooked for a while.

I'm not the kind of filmmaker who's going to go from one thing to the next. I often wish I was that filmmaker, but I'm just not.

As far as writing or directing a film, I've worked with enough people who have done that that I know it's just a whole other level of responsibility and chaos and murder that I could not see happening. For now, I'm just going to see what comes. I know what I like and what direction I have.

I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.

I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.

Making movies is not rocket science. It's about relationships and communication and strangers coming together to see if they can get along harmoniously, productively, and creatively. That's a challenge. When it works, it's fantastic and will lift you up. When it doesn't work, it's almost just as fascinating.

I've always developed all my own pieces, and they're time-consumers.

When you make new musicals, you have the great freedom and the great burden that it can be changed.

Artists are like everybody else.

I love to direct! I get really jazzed by directing, but directing is not the same kind of personal expression, the same kind of personal intimate expression that writing is. Because when you're directing, you're basically managing, basically getting out of people doing their job, except when you see them going astray.

I think - in general, I don't think I've been involved in a single movie that turned out the way I anticipated it to turn out. Just because, as an actor, there's only so much that I can bring to a project.

There's something that comes into you that's so exciting when you're directing.

I have the soul of a director.

I'm the creative director of awesomeness.

I guess when you're holding the creative reins, you can be across everything, and it's more authentic. You can control it.

There's no way I see myself as a director. Direction is far too creative.

Directing was a big learning experience for me because I had to deal with every aspect of everything-all this constant decision-making, with people asking you questions at every moment, and you have to have answers for them all.

I'm a control freak with regards to certain aspects. I think you just have to be when you're making stuff in the world. You have to have a clear idea what you want.

A lot of my songs, they're like puzzle pieces, and there's just one way to put them together. You could, if you needed to, get the scissors out and cut up things to make them work. But I don't want to do that.

I think that's the job of a director really, to sort of funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.

There's some things that you're passionate about as a director. You just know it has to be a certain way. The challenge is resolving those so everyone is happy and no one feels that they have not been heard.

My analysis of the situation was that Roman Polanski wasn't trying to break us down or get a performance out of us by destroying us. He was absolutely, very simply, trying to recreate this clear picture in his head. And the pictures he creates are absolutely perfect, and they are exactly what he saw in his head.