Keira Knightley Quotes

In Korea, the director has the final word. If the director makes a decision, that decision is final. In Hollywood, every decision needs to go through the producer, the studio, and sometimes even the main actor. There is a certain procedure that needs to be followed.

When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.

As far as producing, once we started shooting, I soon realized where the critical decisions about the movies were really being made, and it wasn't on the set. They were being made in the production meetings. That's where producing a movie happens. And that's where I wanted to be. I didn't just want to be a piece, a pawn being played. I wanted to take part in the creative process, and that's how I sort of got introduced to the idea.

You always worry about films when you hear about them making decisions after announcements are made.

Most films I work on, the people making the film are constantly second-guessing the executives of the studio, the producer, and the audience. It is very hard to accomplish anything in that situation.

If in doubt, move decisions up to the President.

I'm proudest of the fact that I've been able to make a few movies in the studio system that are slightly unorthodox and personal. But it's never quite as easy as you dream that it could be.

The studio system reminds me of the stock market.

Every director bites the hand that lays the golden egg.

I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.

Eventually, everyone said, Why don't you direct? It would save time. And that's how it started.

With 'Kidnapped,' there didn't seem to be a sure hand guiding it: everything had to be run-up-the-pole, so to speak, and there seemed to be a large committee, every day fighting about what the show was about.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

I love producing shows. And so when you're on a show where other people are making decisions you don't necessarily agree with it, after a while you start to feel like a passenger.

I think actors are getting so much more power these days, but I'm not. I stay very much away from the decisions, the way in which things are orchestrated, what's been changed. I just try to stay completely in the role as the actor and as the character.

You can get together, you can talk as much as you want, but if there's not a decision-making process - that's where democracy really matters.

I suppose where I am sort of reflects the work I have chosen to do. Are there occasional frustrations because I can't work with a certain director because it's a big studio movie, and I don't have enough of a studio profile? The answer is yes. But generall... generally, I have the career I have chosen myself.

My father always watches my films and gives his opinion. I am even ready to reshoot at times if he asks me to.

I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, 'Oh really? Why don't you go try - it's not easy.'

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

Studios just sometimes make decisions on their own that you're always flabbergasted by. It just happens that way for whatever reason - not even pointing fingers, it just is.

If it's something I feel I can do alright, I like being in those, and some that I think Rob Schneider and David Spade would be funnier at than me, I tell them to do it. I don't have any clue how we decide. There's this thing, this "Click", actually, one of my friends called me up, my partner told me about this idea that Steve Koren had. Steve Koren, by the way, the guy who wrote it with Mark O'Keefe, Steve Koren I've known since I was 22. He was a page at Saturday Night Live.

In America, their pre-production is really long but the production is much shorter. They decide everything from the beginning to the end. They edit and nobody can touch it, actually.