Tananarive Due Quotes

No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He's got to put all his talent and feeling into them!

I'm just following my own art, and I just think that the only thing I can do to be a great artist is do the best job I can in whatever movie I do.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

I have sworn to die painting.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

Well, I consider myself as much as a filmmaker as a moviegoer.

When you're filming, not everything is rational.

You know, 'Top Gun' was the movie I saw in high school that made me want to be a filmmaker. I remember very specifically coming out of the Century 21 Theater in Colorado from seeing it, and my friend saying, 'What did you think of the movie?' And I said, 'I think I know what I want to do for a living.' That's a true story.

I have great people surrounding me and helping me out. I'm totally in love with directing movies and I hope to do more of it.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

When you go to a studio with something you want to make, or they come to you with something they want to make, more often than not, it's a tent pole. Not something one single person is really passionate about on a creative level.

Directing comes closer than anything I’ve found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.

I had a love for photography, which of course rolled into cinematography.

My father is so in love with making movies, and he'sso charismatic about it, that it's hard to be around him withoutwanting to make movies.

Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

I can't do the movies like I do painting because I am really more of a sort of dilettante or something. I mean I know guys that make movies that I can see it is absolutely their medium and they can just go from one movie right into the next because it is just - they have got it so much on the tips of their fingers. But for me it is a special effort.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.

I thought of myself as part of the general filmmaking effort. And as my scope broadened, I began to think about directing. I wanted to be the guy who got to say whether the dress is red or blue.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

I do love making films. I want to be a filmmaker that grows and progresses and does keep trying to push myself. I think that's it... and a bit of confidence maybe.

[Martin] Scorsese says one of the great things he loves about it is how Mark can't get the right shot and he's killing people because he can't get the right shot. It's an example of what film-makers are like.

Writing is too hard not to do exactly what you want to do. It's a very draining and agonizing process for me, and I don't want to live with any piece of work that I don't believe in completely. I have to believe completely in what I'm doing. It has grown organically out of my own experience.

Filmmaking in general is just really where I'm putting all of my energy.

Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.