Diane Lane Quotes

I think when you're a director, it's hard to do something unless you're absolutely over-the-moon in love with it. The audience, they spend 90 minutes with it, but for you, it's anywhere between a year and a half to three years of your life, every day, working on it.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.

Doing a movie is a stressful thing. You spend months of you life focusing into that one project, and I want to make sure I do something I really like or I'm really passionate about.

There is a director for a reason, because a director knows what's best for the movie. You just give your director as much as you can to work with, and hopefully, the decisions they make are going to be great.

You have to have the essential pleasure of making a movie. It's such a huge factor and adventure for a director because you really are the leader and the captain.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

If I start thinking, 'Is this movie going to open? Is this movie going to do well?' I'm not focusing on the job. The job is to make a good movie.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

I love making movies. But it's a lot of investing your heart and soul. It can be exhausting.

With directing, you always have three or four things constantly on the go. It's a tough industry and a tough time, particularly if you're doing things a little outside the box or independent features.

To make personal movies that you are the author of, is quite a difficult thing. It takes a lot of stamina.

Directing is: you're overwhelmed the whole time. Your mind never stops. If you care about it. You wake up in the morning and you begin thinking about it and then you go to sleep at night and you're still thinking about it.

I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.

I try to do as much as I can, every facet of filmmaking.

I honestly never wanted to direct. It was only when I started to work on 'Alexander the Great' that I realized I had to direct. I saw something so specifically in my mind, I could not leave it to someone else.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

It's the director's job to piece together my performance, his interpretation of my takes, each take, and string them together and make a statement. I'm red paint on a canvas for a painter.

No one ever sets out to make a bad movie. There's almost always incredible amount of passion and work put behind any given project. You just have to give it everything you got, and sometimes it works out, and a lot of the times it doesn't.

I truly believe that cinema is a collaborative effort, and as long as I get to tell, and be part of, interesting stories and work with genuine people, I don't see any project as a 'risk.'

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.

A film is made in somebody's head - out of their determination to do it at all.

That's the best way to work on a project: talk to the director. In the end, it's the director's idea of how they perceive the movie and how they perceive the characters.

Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.