Antonio Banderas Quotes

To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, 'Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.'

Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

It's a lot of fun to be a part of films that you don't exactly know how they're going to turn out.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

People think if you're a movie star, you're the boss. But first of all, I'm not a movie star, I'm in a very different place. I'm not looking to do what I want - I am looking for what we can find. It's a creative process.

The best films come about through experimentation.

You have to make films you feel strongly about. And then hope you can find the audience.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

About half my designs are controlled fantasy, 15 percent are total madness and the rest are bread-and-butter designs.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

Show me a Scorsese film, and I'll show you a movie where he's taken risks. It's just his nature. He's an artist, and artists take risks. He always does what he believes in.

I've never really thought of myself as just an actor; I always thought of myself as aspiring to be an artist, and an artist has to take risks and put himself on the line.

The essential nature of all filmed entertainment is that you area always straddling the line of whether or not you can realize something that you want to do.

I became passionate about filmmaking. The thrill to make something out of nothing and to go out there to see whether it will work or not attracted me.

If you really want your films to say something that you hope is unique, then patience and stamina, thick skin and a kind of stupidity, a mule-like stupidity, is what you really need.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else. My style of filmmaking happens to be give the audience what they know they don't want, but they want. Ultimately I have to write and direct in a way that let's just say, you don't want to regret making a choice.

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.

I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.