Jake Gyllenhaal Quotes

There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors

Movies are certainly a director's medium, so getting the opportunity to work with really good directors is everything to me.

The best films are because of nobody but the director.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

A director just pushes them a little this way or that way.

Directors are the fulcrum of the movie. They guide us well, not merely rein actors in. Whenever we stray, they bring us back on track.

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

I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.

There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.

I had a whole new respect for directors.

Therefore, when you see the end result, it's difficult to see who's the director, me or them. Ultimately, everything belongs to the actors - we just manage the situation.

I think when you pay attention to the shots, you're aware of the fact that there's a director. Really, it's the director's job to disappear and allow the movie to just feel.

He [Oliver Stone] is great. I really like working with directors who know what they want and aren't afraid to tell you, "Do it like this. Don't do it like that."

I always used to associate good directors as being ones who are totally extreme and have an answer for everything and there are no loose ends.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

To me, one of the main things that a director does is create the tone of his movie.

As a director you have to - you don't have the option of saying, "I'm not watching this."

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.

When I was working with Stanley Kubrick [on "Eyes Wide Shut"], he would always say, "You never tell the audience what to feel. Let them choose to have their responses."

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

I love directors who talk action as opposed to emotion.

I'm very director oriented.

An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.

And I realized that directing actors is really important because that's what ends up on screen.

I didn't want to be a director for hire. It really just took me a long time to learn how to direct and to feel up to the job.