Robert Downey Jr. Quotes

It's very different working with Vetrimaaran. If he's happy with your shot, all he will tell you is, 'Good job. Go do what you have to next.'

I do a film only when I feel I will be comfortable with the set-up and other members of the team.

When you make a film you make a film. You don't think about how it will be marketed.

Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

You have more time to work in movies. My experience with movies is that you have more time to experiment with the character and camera angles and things like that.

As soon as I finished film school I was thinking about, how do I get to feature films? It took about eight years, and I'm still working. Feature films was not the end goal. Feature films was one of the stages. Getting to the point of the Coen brothers or Tarantino, where you're writing your own material and have the budget to do it properly, that's the end goal, and I'm close to that.

I don't think it's a mistake to put every great idea into the first movie, because I've always said there won't be a second movie if you go 'we'll hold back these ideas for another one.

I did 40 voices for Chris Wedge, the director of the first film, before coming up with the version we used. He was hard to please, I don't know why. I gave him really slow talking voices. then I thought perhaps Sid could be an Indian sounding sloth. To find out more about my character, I watched footage of sloths. I discovered that the food they store in their pouches rots and ferments and half the time they're drunk.

The moment that you start to read a script, you're watching the movie in your mind, and that's the one moment that you have. Then, you go off to make the movie and you become so lost in it.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

There's a lot of time sitting in movies, so you can put alligators in people's trailers in your spare time. So it [making a film] moves slower, which in some ways is great, because you can live with a scene and invest in it a lot. And in some ways it's hard, because sometimes you can start to lose your energy a little bit, but both are fun.

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator.

There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script and then you cut that and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

Team America must have been the biggest pain in the ass. And if we want to talk well-organized, they got Bill Pope, who is the DP on The Matrix, because he was just like, "I want to do something less serious."

The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

You always want to do something different. I enjoy the process. I like making movies, and it's increasingly hard to find a movie you'd want to make.

I'm all about working with directors that are doing different techniques and I think everyone has their way of getting it to the place that they think is best.

At Pixar, I don't have to compromise at all. When I look at the finished "Toy Story 3," I don't sit and constantly think, oh, the actor was having a bad day, or oh, it rained and we couldn't use that set. The story that I wanted to tell is what is on screen, and I haven't had to compromise it one iota.

It's always a problem with television and with films, you always shoot things out of sequence, so you just take your best stab at every moment. You can't really - you'll drive yourself crazy if you dwell on the negative aspects of it or your shortcomings.

I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.

I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them. No one believes this, but it's the same. I'm the same person, trying to make it work. I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.