Irwin Winkler Quotes

You can't have cinema by committee if you're trying to do it well.

The most important thing for Quentin and the most important thing for me is to make the best film possible.

I've never had an issue with studios. I believe in them as true creative partners in the process.

In a collaborative environment directors hire actors because they want their input, not just their bodies.

I mean, I'm willing to do anything with Chris Chulack - he's one of my favorite directors I've ever worked with, and I just think he's a fantastic man, and a great creator, and a good friend.

I have the highest respect for stars and auteur directors. But I don't want to work with people who only invite me to the preview. We want to be in the collaborative movie business, not the financing one.

I see my actors as my collaborators.

There are lot of people I'd wanna work with, but Wes Anderson, I would just wanna sit down with the guy. If he would ever put me in one of his movies, that would be the end.

What I'm trying to do is to make films - 'I Origins' is one of them - with the new generation of filmmakers. I want to support that.

There's no particular method or course of action that I take in order to decide who I'm going to work with besides feeling complete and total respect and admiration for that artist.

When it's a good director, you can feel when they trust you when they cast you.

What I love about making movies is that it's a collaboration. It's one of the most rewarding things, to create something and have someone show you something that you didn't see, and vice versa.

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.

We really enjoy that, having a relationship with writers, developing material and getting a director, actors, that we have kind of that family kind of as a group we're going to do it together mentality in a project. Then the tough part is - so what actually goes has very little to do with us sometimes.

I really never imagined that I could ever even direct anything, so 'Girls Like Girls' was co-directed.

I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.

I didn't so much choose the film as director Claire Denis chose me.

From an artist's point of view, I always want to work with the writers I admire.

It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

I think that any actor - any artist, period - would love to work with an artist like Lee Daniels.

And I just want to work with good directors and good people.

I have very strong relationships with my actors when I'm shooting. When you love an actor's work, you always feel you have to go further, and you make several films together. One film just gives you time to get acquainted.

I wanted to work with Mike Leigh. I had my list of British people I wanted to work with, and I wanted to work with David Lynch and Woody Allen.

If a script comes together, and you end up liking the people who are part of it, that's when you can make magic happen. It's a huge combination of trying to find something you think you can deliver on and a director you think you can collaborate with to make a good picture.

I'm just gonna make movies the best I can, do the festival thing or whatever can come. I plan on working with a lot of the same guys over and over again. I hope the majority of us can stick together.