Hayao Miyazaki Quotes

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

I don't know if 'Crash' is a good movie or not because I didn't set out to make a movie. Really, what I wanted to do is more of a social experiment.

I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

What's been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what's transcendent.

I never control a film. The film controls me.

I've done a lot of ad films where an idea can be translated in 30 or 40 seconds. But in a movie, an idea needs to be stretched for two hours, and requires you to draw a bit from your experiences in life.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Directors only have instinct to work out of, because there is no formula. Formulas don't work. Actually, if you follow a formula, you will probably end up with a bad movie.

There are things I want to say: They are very important to me, and, not being a writer, I do it through movies.

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.

Directing is its own monster with its own set of muscles and exercises.

We intellectualize it, and we rationalize it, but it's really about a love of movies, and I think whether you're making an art film or you're making a genre film, if you don't really love that movie you are trying to make, you'll be able to tell.

Films like 'Velvet Goldmine' are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.

I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing.

Baz Luhrmann is a very visual director. He needs to see things as they would unfold in his world.

For me, I was entirely focused on 'Episode VIII' and having this experience, and now I'm just thinking of putting the movie out there and seeing how audiences respond to it.

The most important thing as a filmmaker, the hardest journey you'll have, is to find your point of view.

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

I've always tried to create music the way Kubrick makes film, just kind of mimicking consciousness. He has a way of mimicking this greater power.

I don't think there is a movie that I've been on that I wasn't sure I could direct it better. But certainly also, as a director of photography, I have to serve the movie in whatever way I can as a filmmaker.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.