Daniel Handler Quotes

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

The directors I respect are the ones who have a collaborative attitude, who collaborate with actors.

I've certainly worked with really great directors who haven't acted.

Peter Chelsom and Edgar Wright are totally different directors and worlds apart, but both really accomplished directors who are certain of how they want to make a film.

I like working with directors I respect, who give me freedom but also give me a good base from which to work.

I don't think you can be a director without a kind of sense of competitiveness.

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.

The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn't have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It's why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

Caroline says as she gets up from the floor, you can hit me all you want to, but I don't love you anymore.

The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there's nothing anyone can do or say. It's broken.

I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it.

It's quite liberating to have a director stand beside the camera and say: "Do this now, and do that now..." It's also a bit sordid but it liberates an actor, I think.

We had to break up, though. We wanted different things - like he wanted kids and I wanted him to hear.

Entertainment must be a satisfying emotional experience, a stirring of the heart. We need all kinds of young men and women. Those people with an artist's eye and an executive's brain that we term directors. Those wrestlers with their souls and typewriters known as authors. The beggars on horseback called actors and actresses.

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.

I wore it, this careless thing you don't even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn't a gift, this thing I'm returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.

I can't imagine any director directing a screenplay of mine, because the great directors all have very personal styles, and the ones that don't are not very interesting directors.

Sometimes what you lose in the time it takes to let an actor do something that you don't like as a director, you gain in not shutting them down creatively by telling them their idea sucks.

Somewhere we went wrong Our love is like a song But you won't sing along Have you forgotten About us

I just want to make a beautiful film. I've had it in my head for so long, so I want to try. Every now and again I get scared. And that's not really how I operate in songwriting or as Sia the artist, the singer. I don't operate from a place of fear. But this is such a new area for me. I still have some insecurity. So, like, once a week I get washed from the top of my skull down to my toes with this vomitous feeling of fear. I think, "Just don't do it. You don't have to do it. You're already a singer and a songwriter. Really, you don't have to make a movie.".