Jewell Parker Rhodes Quotes

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.

When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.

If I go home from a day of shooting, and I haven't at some point felt the magic, I'm really frustrated.

When you're lucky enough to have a good film made of your novel - and 'Never Let Me Go' is, believe me, a heartbreakingly good film indeed - you get wonderfully talented individuals each focusing on their special area.

I think a movie is a media that is evoking feelings.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

God bless McNally, it's got some fantastic stuff in it, but it's no easy task to make a movie out of.

There's no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. It's all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.

With 'Ed Wood,' I sobbed. With 'Frankenweenie,' I was crying. With 'Edward Scissorhands,' I always cry. There's always an incredible amount of purity, even if they look a certain way.

Neil Mahoney was definitely the visionary in taking 'Freak Dance' from stage to screen. He made it more cinematic. He brought the choreography, all the ways to shoot that. I was more the director of actors. I was in front of the camera directing, and he was behind the camera directing.

I don't cover my scenes. We approach it visually. Sometimes we go out of our way to do awkward blocking so that we can tell whatever the emotional heartbeat is of that scene in the most interesting way possible.

When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.

Filmmaking is about moments. In real life, things might take six months, a year, but [in filmmaking] you have to create the moment where it happened.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

Filmmaking is really connected to life and all of the expressions that different arts found to allow access to life. Filmmaking touches on all of it.

For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.

That [photographs] disturb readers is exactly as it should be: that's why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.

I guess I probably see myself as a director. If I had to choose, I think that that's the aspect of the process that I'm most excited by.

These television shows that have 14 shots of somebody looking at each other with the wind blowing through their hair drive me insane.

I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.