Danis Tanovic Quotes

Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.

I feel that I will be more of a feature director, and I will go away completely from videos. I want to do features and have written several of them. I'm looking to be more like a Steven Spielberg.

Films are all about decisions, and that's what I love.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

I truly enjoy directing. I enjoy looking at the words on the paper and visualizing how to make them come to life.

I would really love to direct one day. I think there are certain actors who love the character and the performance and that's all they want to be a part of.

There are three things that are important for a film. Number one is story, number two is story, number three is story. Good actors can save a bad script and make it bearable, but good actors can't make a bad script good - they can just make it bearable.

No other aspect of filmmaking has tempted me to do a film other than the script and the story itself.

My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process - finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.

I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.

I graduated from the American Film Institute in 2010, where I studied as a director, and came out with a few features I really wanted to make.

Sometimes the nature of a big movie, the nature of the material, the scene doesn't have the richness that you'd want it to.

Directing is a tremendous art.

In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is 'Ratatouille.' It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.

But I did on projects that I produced, that I directed, that I acted in because it was important. I want to be a filmmaker. I don't want to be an actor who directs, I want to be a director. I want to be a filmmaker. So that's a big difference.

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

I am incapable of directing a film like 'Agneenath.' I can do only what I am good at, so I would have been the worst choice to direct it. It has aggression, action and an inherent violence in it - things I am not capable of directing in my films.

You can't, no matter what anyone says, build a movie around someone.

I'm attracted to directors in general because I appreciate the work and the job they have to do. I watched the post-production, I watched the pre-production... post-production is something that I'm very interested in and I did spend a lot of time in editing rooms when I was young pretending to be sick.

For a lot of my childhood, I didn't want to direct movies because I didn't really know what directing was.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

Whether I'm acting or making it, at the end of the day it's telling the story; action, drama. You want the audience to feel it - the story, the action, the scene, or a particular shot. I just keep working on crafting my art, on how to make action movies.

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

I love all kinds of movies. I'd especially like to make some, you know, violent crime drama.

Directing is not on my agenda, but writing is. I want to write everything from action, superhero films to quiet dramas, smaller films.