Christopher McQuarrie Quotes

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

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

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

The filmmakers always have a great level of control.

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.

Directing is creating a whole. You're able to combine different elements and create a film that is unique and true to your vision.

The only person who has artistic control is the director, and 'director' is how you spell God in Hollywood.

There is a director for a reason, because a director knows what's best for the movie. You just give your director as much as you can to work with, and hopefully, the decisions they make are going to be great.

I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.

I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.

There's no way I see myself as a director. Direction is far too creative.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

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.

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

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.

The truth is, when I started to make films, I was terrified. I had a huge difference in what I was writing in the screenplay and what was on the screen after. Sometimes there was a big gap. Now, the more I have experienced, the more I do movies, the more I feel that the dream is closer to the screen. It's coming with experience.

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.

Eventually, it came to this place like, 'I'd like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.' 'Man of Tai Chi' became the story to tell.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

As a director, I get to have a much broader creative expression than as an actress.

Being a director is almost like being another sort of character, but you're out of view.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people's minds.