Chelsea Handler Quotes

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

If I have an idea I want to put in a movie, I know what camera will make that look best, and I have ideas for future projects and stuff I'd like to build for those. I think it's just part of how I work, though.

I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.

Very often, it's the director that I'm attracted to. If it's a really good director, I don't even have to read the script to say yes.

I have been very fortunate since 'Ice Age' to make movies that somehow charm audiences. I think that the key to it for me has been coming up with the right ideas but, more importantly, choosing the right collaborators and artists to execute those ideas.

I want to work with filmmakers who are really smart.

You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.

'Gandhi' was a well-made film but surely not my best. It had flaws, which I understand two-and-a-half decades after I directed it. I will never call it a propaganda film for the Indian Congress, but it could have been made better had I concentrated on certain minute details.

It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.

The relationship between a director and an editor in documentaries is so important.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, I know what it means to craft a story, especially when you've shot a lot of material.

Jeph Loeb has been great to work with, and he's been really supportive of some really bizarre ideas I've had.

When I do feature films, I usually have a very strong sense of what I want to do. I have topics and subjects, so I go for it. I even know technically what I want to. But in the case of documentary, the story comes to me.

I want to make my kind of films but make them work commercially, too. When my presentation meets the director's imagination, the result will be great.

The best thing about making films is the time spent making them. When I see works that I've made, I always think what a great time I had making them. The films remind me of that time.

You do a film and you have hopes for it, and you read it, and you see it one way in your head, and you shoot it, and it'll always change from what you started out. Sometimes it turns out better, sometimes it turns out; I don't know, but as movies go I've never experienced seeing and likening what I've read, and I liked what I read.

We certainly have a lot of ideas, and we both love what Tony [Fucile] did with the book [Bink & Gollie]. If we could all pull it off, I think all three of us would like to do another.

I think, for me, I'm always more interested in the process of making the movie than the movie itself

The nice thing about a documentary, I think, is that so much of it is editing, too. You sort of get to keep making decisions. It's not as much like when you do a narrative, fictional piece, and you have a certain number of shooting days, and you're like, "Well, that's what it is." You can continue to seek out more photographs or try to find more footage. The genre gives you the ability to keep working on it, which is great for a first-time director.

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

There's so many intangible forces that come into play when making a film, I have no idea what the public will ultimately think of something that I do, let alone critics.

What happened with Final Destination was that the movie was in post-production for a long time and I think they changed a lot of the deaths, so a lot of those things were last-minute additions. Everything we shot is in the movie and it's all been designed. We didn't change anything. It's been a year of making those things happen, exactly as we had pictured them.