Paul Schrader Quotes

It's amazing how everyone has their different ways of working. I like hearing about that process, reading about it. I have so much appreciation for movies because I understand how hard it is to make one. There is always something I gain from watching a movie, whether it's a silly romantic comedy or an art film.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.

It's not just about acting. I love film, I'm a director now, I love writing, I love producing, I love having a company that makes films and to be prolific and have a place to put all the ideas that are constantly bubbling up inside of me and that don't let me sleep at night.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

Movies are art and the spirit of the movie depends on the creators.

I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

Filmmaking is such a collaborative medium.

I started as a writer; I started writing when I was little. The acting and directing was an outgrowth of my desire to tell stories.

Filmmaking can be a fine art.

As a filmmaker, I'm a collaborator first.

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

Film-makers are greedy people - we want good stories and good subjects.

I love the process of filmmaking. I understood that you have to be a writer in order to be a director.

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

I want to do films that provide entertainment, but are also content-driven.

At the end of the day, filmmaking is all about telling stories, and I'm just doing my part.

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

Filmmaking is a creative process so there is a lot of collaboration that happens on set between an actor and director, but at the end of the day, we're there to actualize the director's vision and things happen organically.

It's a really unique situation where you just - you make independent films or you make big blockbuster movies, but it's very rare when all of those ingredients come together, and you can really tell a story that you care about with a character you absolutely love with the people you love making movies with.

With Mel [Brooks], only one time and that was later on during "Young Frankenstein" - never with Zero [Mostel] and never with Mel except I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I'd written. And then he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, OK. But we need a villain or we need whatever it was.