Jeff Nichols Quotes

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

Directing is a tremendous art.

My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.

Everything a director does must help the story and the performances. Otherwise, it is useless.

I don't like to watch playback. But being on the set, watching the way the camera is being moved and the way the light is being used, you do get an idea of it.

There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.

A good script and a good brief from the director is enough to let me know what is expected of me.

Directing is creating a whole. You're able to combine different elements and create a film that is unique and true to your vision.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

Directing is more what I would like to get into eventually. Frankly, I feel like it would be a waste if I didn't because I've spent so much time on film sets, and I know how they work, and I love them, and I love leading them. I would like to do that as a director definitely.

I would love to direct a western. I love taking photographs and I'm always fascinated with angles. Also, my father was a film editor, and I have a talent for thinking of things that aren't always in a script.

Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don't relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater; you stay in control through the very end.

I think I would like directing. I really like coming at the work that way.

I've always really respected directors. As much as I was interested in acting, whenever I watched a film, it was always the directing that really stood out to me.

It's one of the things I love about my job: it's my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help.

I like pointing the camera at the actors and letting them fight. Don't let the camera do the fighting for you, and don't let the camera give them the adrenaline hit. Let the people in the frame do that.

Directing films is easier said than done. The job needs a lot of sensibility to put many things in place.

I've discovered that being behind the camera is more fascinating. If I had to choose a profession today, it would have been something behind the camera.

A sad truth I learned as a DP starting out was that it doesn't matter how beautiful I make it if the story and performance are not there. That should be number one.

I'm really fascinated by other directors' methods. I've done a lot of learning by observation.

I was doing well in TV as a freelance cameraman, but it wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. I directed videos and tried to put something cinematic in every one. Dialogue, action sequences, helicopter, Steadicam.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.