Amanda Peet Quotes

I always wished there was somebody like the Coen Brothers and they appeared. And so yeah, my favorite role that I've ever done was in The Man Who Wasn't There. That's my very favorite character I've ever played.

I've been fortunate to work with some amazing Asian filmmakers in independent film.

For years I've wanted to work with this guy, so to actually write at the top of my scripts "Empress, Script by Mark Millar, Art by Stuart Immonen" is an absolute pleasure.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

Quentin Tarantino is a genius. I want to do every single film with him.

That's what I've always wanted to do - work with my favorite writers and make something from scratch with them that we can feel like didn't exist before we came in the room.

I've produced two docs for Cameron Crowe, and I've always loved him as a filmmaker.

I've been acting for many years now, and I find there's nothing I enjoy more than making films with my friends and people I like, who also are the funniest people around.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

I really have very little aspirations about acting because I think that probably the best things have come and gone. I would like to focus on writing and directing. I love writing and directing even though writing can be incredibly painful and lonely. I get great satisfaction from doing it.

I want to write and direct, but I don't think if I did it for 100 years I would ever come close to putting something out there that gives a feeling of all-encompassing and joyous.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

With my two brothers, Jean-Marie and Joel, I wrote a two-page story and wanted to make some kind of movie. We met a French production company, called Why Not?, and the first name we put on the list was Ken Loach. It was a dream for all of us. So, we tried and we met Ken and Paul Laverty, his writer, and they read the two pages and were inspired by that to do something. Paul had the freedom to do his own story - and he wrote his own story, which is better than the one we'd written.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

My brother & I have always said that to write a song, it takes all the experiences of your life, plus the time it takes to write it! To be specific, yes, sometimes a song takes place in one session - together in one day.

Writing and directing just sort of fell into my lap.

I've worked with Neil Jordan, who I really adore. We did The Brave One [2007] together.

It's a really unique situation where you just - you make independent films or you make big blockbuster movies, but it's very rare when all of those ingredients come together, and you can really tell a story that you care about with a character you absolutely love with the people you love making movies with.

I wanted to work with Barry [ Jenkins]. I am a big fan of his from Medicine for Melancholy years ago. Tarrell [Alvin McCraney] is my favorite playwright. I will do anything he asks. The characters were so clearly drawn and three dimensional. It was an easy thing to say yes to.

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

And James L. Brooks then sort of became our mentor, brought us out to Los Angeles and worked on the script for a year with us. We learned so much working with him - just being able to spend time with him, the quality of his mind, the things he comes up with and says. I think Wes [Anderson] and I could go to dinner tonight and spend the whole dinner thinking and talking about things that Jim has said to us over the years.

I was into writing and directing. I was a bit of a reluctant actor. I would always ask friends to shoot or direct their movies, but then they'd want me to be in them.

With Mel [Brooks], only one time and that was later on during "Young Frankenstein" - never with Zero [Mostel] and never with Mel except I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I'd written. And then he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, OK. But we need a villain or we need whatever it was.

I had the great fortune to actually become friends with Sam [Fuller] and ultimately collaborate with him on White Dog, which we wrote together.

It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That’s the faith you have to have.