Tahar Rahim Quotes

On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film.

If a film is good, it will work no matter what.

I just want to make great films and be good in them. And I think that my perception of what's great in a film is constantly evolving.

There are so many elements that make a good film. You need a great director who's driving it.

We've seen so many films now, that you have to be on par with the best films that have preceded you. You just can't make any movie and it will be good.

I don't think many actors are the best judge of careers. I think generally we have good instincts about what we can do in terms of acting. And often they become directors, which I don't want to be.

Somebody once said, you have to wait 20 years before you can tell if a movie's any good or not so that's probably true.

I'd rather have a small part in a good film with good people than play the lead in something I don't really care for.

I would say that it's mainly about the director. It's a hard quality to find, but I always know whether I want to do something or not. The character is important to me, as is getting to work with people that I feel like I can learn from and make a great movie with.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

You can have an amazing director and terrible script, and the film's not going to be great. But if you have the most incredible script and an okay director, you could still get a really good film.

There is an established tradition of actors directing films that have a particular, personal meaning for them - Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and most recently George Clooney to name a few. Remarkably, their films share an unusually high percentage of being very good.

Sometimes I do movies that aren't any good, or sometimes I might not be any good in them, or sometimes they don't do very well.

I just think Australia tends to make very good movies, so if someone hands me an Australian or an American film script I would guess the Australian film would be more intriguing.

I've tried like hell to make bad movies good, and I can't. Maybe Marlon Brando has been able to do that at times. But even he has a hard time making 'The Appaloosa' a good movie.

There are so many things that have to go right for a movie to be good that it's a miracle whenever one is.

My main aim has always been to do good quality films with roles that have some substance. With Power and Beauty there were loads of things that I liked about the movie, which made me opt for it.

So yeah, a good director will be able to listen and hear everything, but have a confident vision of his own that he can say, 'oh yeah - that's a great point.' And you never know; often you can help far more than you think you can, because there's so much more that he's juggling than an actor.

I'm very enthusiastic about the Academy Awards because if there were no Oscars, we wouldn't have as many good movies as we do have.

If you have a script that's not great, if you have a great director, you can make a great movie, but if you have a great script with a director who's not good, never are you going to have a good movie.

I knew Secrets and Lies was a great film, but I didn't expect it to get the attention it did because none of his other films had and I thought they were just as good.

A film is sort of binary - it either works or it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all.

I've been lucky enough to work with some great directors, and I don't want to throw that away by doing one big horrible big budget film.

You've got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie's good enough, it's going to survive; and if it's not, well, it won't.

Because I've made a film with such an amazing director as Tarantino, I'm much more conscious of working with good directors from now on, so that's what's important to me. I don't really care about making a big movie - I just want to make good ones.