Howard Hawks Quotes

When you direct a movie, you're basically looking at a story, the way you want to look at it. You bring that director's vision, and I'm totally open for that.

Alexander Payne's very specific. His scripts are always complete when you start working on them.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director.

When you produce and direct, your movies are different to you. They're not just something you act in.

The kind of work I do and the films I believe in, I had to take charge of making that kind of cinema.

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

I am incapable of directing a film like 'Agneenath.' I can do only what I am good at, so I would have been the worst choice to direct it. It has aggression, action and an inherent violence in it - things I am not capable of directing in my films.

I've read a hundred fantastic scripts that didn't pan out as films, and I completely put that on the directors. I've also read some mediocre scripts that have ended up being amazing, and I credit that to the directors. They're the storytellers. If you don't have a good storyteller, you really have nothing.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.

'Rocky' is an incredibly human story, and 'Creed' is very inspired by the Rocky lore, but there's something kind of profound in letting it all go. This is the first time I'm co-writing, and I'm learning as I go. This process is so different from 'Fruitvale'; hopefully it gets made.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.

When I was working on 'Big Fan,' I didn't really feel like any lines needed to be changed or enhanced or expanded upon in any way. I thought it was a solid script. All you had to do was what it said.

A script like 'Nightcrawler' gives me an opportunity to truly realize a vision that's mine, which is exciting.

Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.

A script is only as good as the director who's making it.

The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I've done before and hopefully it becomes a good movie.

I think it's always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod's distance from the actual moviemaking.