Sergio Leone Quotes

When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way.

My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.

I'm currently trying to direct my own material.

I come up with the ideas for my videos, and I write the lyrics and choreograph them, and I direct them and tell everyone what to do and how I want them to sing the parts and do the tongue pops and eye rolls and stuff like that.

I don't think I'll ever be a producer who's into taking the meetings and fighting the big fights with studios. I really don't like that part. I'm much more interested in the material.

I'm a designer, producer and I am hands-on for every project I undertake. The creative side of what I do is really something I think people overlooked for a while.

I've never actually directed anything I haven't made up. I've never adapted anything.

Nothing on 'Relapse' and very little on 'Recovery' was produced by me.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

Film work can be very interesting, but it also can be awfully boring because who creates the film? The actors? No. It is the director. It's his piece of work.

There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.

My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to.

Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else.

If you write, produce and direct, you own things and see them through to the end.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

In general, I don't feel artists should need producers.

A producer should only be there to enable an artist to be himself.

I think - in general, I don't think I've been involved in a single movie that turned out the way I anticipated it to turn out. Just because, as an actor, there's only so much that I can bring to a project.

I'm worried a lot of our work day as artists is a producer's creation - not an artist's creation.

The critics are not writers - they're not a part of the creative process; therefore, they should not influence how I go about doing my next bit of work.

The writing of 'The Ladykillers' was fun. But once it goes out of your hands it's not fun, 'especially for someone who is used to being hands-on like me.

I think that, again, filmmaking is the director's medium in the end, and the best thing a producer can do is stay out of the way and support the director one hundred percent.