Justin Simien Quotes

Nobody sets out to make a bad film.

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.

For me it sounds weird saying that the filmmakers respect the film. I don't imagine that there's other ways to make a film, but unfortunately there is.

Film is the cheapest part of the movie making process. The expense is the 100-man crew and the financing and everything.

I don't want to make a habit of just playing small roles, because I really enjoy the process of being part of a film and staying on it for the length of time that everybody else is as well.

I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious.

Anyone can buy CG technology. It's not that it's easy to make those films. Those films are just as difficult, they're incredibly hard to make.

When you decide you want to make a film, you start listening to everything that anyone has to say about filmmaking and reading everything, and there's a maxim about film being a visual medium, and so you need to make, in a sense, a silent movie and layer on dialogue.

I never watched a frame of the film until it was finished.

I love the process of making films and an incidental satisfaction is the fact that most of them made money.

There's a lot of laughing on a horror movie set. They're magical in that way.

I think that the process of making a film is an underrated factor in how that film turns out.

Obviously, you never shoot the scenes of a film in order or only very rarely.

This is all so exciting I've decided to keep making one movie every 36 years.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

You can't print everything and that's not good for filmmaking, because you wanna have as many options as possible and print as much as you can, but if you're going to shoot a film - an independent movie on film, the only way to really do it is to print your selects.

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

If anything, as a general rule, the cheaper the movie the more creative the experience, generally speaking. Its not to denigrate expensive movies. I dont want to seem biting the hands that feed me, but with big movies, especially with a lot of effects, the role of the actor is somewhat diminished.

I have great respect for the FBI, and I know that there have been some rumors lately that the FBI was disenchanted because of what we were doing in story, or doing a certain take: that's not true. Actually the FBI was tremendously enthusiastic about us doing [ J. Edgar Hoover ] film.

When I watch films now, theres more of a musicality to the way the film are written.

I live a very simple existence when I'm not on the road. Because when I'm on the road making a movie, I'm away from home.

If you're going to break cinema, film, and movies apart, very rarely to you get the opportunity to even think that you've been a part of cinema.

Film, as any immigrant will tell you, television and movies is the way we make sense of America when we first got here.

I don't expect every movie to be done exactly the way I would have done it.