Larry Charles Quotes

I have a hard time visualizing anything, which is why I'm not a director, and which is why I try to work with ones I know have a strong idea in mind.

It's true that I don't think I'd be a good director. If I were a director, I'd try to hire the best people I could and then leave them alone. I don't know much about cameras or lighting, so I'd make sure that I had a really good cameraman who understood lenses and lighting, and I say to him, "This is the scene we have to shoot and this is what I think it should be, you go do it." Same with actors. But really, very good directors who know everything do basically the same thing. They hire you and then they leave you alone.

When the director has a vision for a piece that I've never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals, and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they're trying to create.

Even when I'm not directing, that doesn't stop Owen from having ideas for what I should be doing.

A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

You have a lot of ideas …. I want them so I can test them.

The vision people have of a director is completely flawed - someone with a crystalline vision of everything they're going to do. How boring would that be? It's a creative and collaborative process.

Being able to chuck ideas around and bounce ideas off each other with anyone I'm working with is just something I love to do, that's how most of these ideas are formed.

The concept of making a movie in which the director dictates is kind of exotic - and absolutely not truthful. Directing means allowing a great deal of collaboration and listening and having the ability to change your mind.

Usually, the best ideas come from other people's good ideas, which then, after a short gestation period, become your ideas.

Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

I think every time you take on a new role, you're trying to help find that voice and you add your own bits and pieces along the way but with Noah [Baumbach] it's already done.

When you're a director, you have great respect for directors. I am really pretty loyal to any director that I am working for and I want to help them realize whatever story and mood and tone that they're trying to realize. As an actor, you really just are a cog - you are an important cog, but you are just a piece of the machine.

We always feel there are 3 parts to the song. The most important part is the reason it should exist. Our process usually consists of me sitting at the piano & Bob hovering over it. We throw ideas out...I start to play something...he'll hum something to make it better. He'll throw a line to me, I'll twist it to make it better and we scramble around like that for sometimes hours and days, 'til we both agree we've got something to show! That's how it works!

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you're creating and writing it, or sometimes you're writing and directing it, or other times you're there from the very beginning.

I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I'm using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions.

Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude.

Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.

I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job.

As an actor you don't control the end result. Because you're a director, you get to control the end result. I think for us, we really have to show up and participate and give. And then let go.

I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.

The best directors I've worked with, they all have the same thing in common. They're the first to say, 'I don't know.' If you ask them, 'How are we actually pulling off this movie?', they'll just shrug and go, 'I have absolutely no idea.'