Jonathan Nolan Quotes

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

When I'm making a movie, it's making use of my creative juices, and it fills me up with what really is - I think my purpose here is to tell stories.

I miss directing. I see stories in images and music more so than in dialogue.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.

I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

I would definitely like to direct at some point. I've been very fortunate to work with some amazing talent and study them. But when the right time and the right story arrives, and I feel like I'm compelled to tell it, then I'll do that.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.

When you're making a film, you become incredibly close. It's not like you're filing away papers all day. You're creating with human emotions, so you do become very connected, so it is familial and romantic.

I think films are bigger than structure.

When I read 'The Water Diviner,' I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That's the real arrogance of a director!

My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

You may not quite understand the cinematic tricks that go behind the making of a film, but as long as you feel it, I think that's the important thing.

I try and let the film do the talking.

I am interested in people. I'm interested in telling stories, whether that is behind the camera or in front of the camera.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

Eventually, when I got the 'Meadowland' script, I saw something in it that made me think I could make something special out of it, something that could work with my style. Emotionally, I connected to it. I thought, 'If I feel this way just imagining it, maybe we can make that happen on screen and make people feel something when they watch it.'

I want to create films that will speak to different parts of our hearts and brains, stories told from a different angle.

I love cinema and creating new things, but essentially, I am creating all this because I want people to see it.

When you're filming, you're blind. But if you follow what really moves you, then you operate from a place of hope: maybe that the story you're telling will resonate with whatever the world will have become when the film is ready to be born.