Mark Romanek Quotes

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

Sometimes the producer has more say and the director takes what he is given. On other occasions, you don't see the producer very much and the director is the one who it is all about.

As an actress you can participate, you can be a co-author, help the director. But I always wanted to be able to make the big decisions.

Film is a team thing. There is no auteur.

We're producing a movie now, 'The Onion' Movie, and it's very difficult for me to be on the set. If I'm not right in the trenches, it's very difficult for me to watch another director, because I'm not involved and it's not exciting.

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.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work.

Acting's fine if the script's written by Paddy Chayefsky and Martin Scorsese directs it, but unless you have something like that, I don't really enjoy acting.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

It's the reality: film is a director's medium, and, ultimately, they are the ones that are in charge, and you have to respect that because somebody has to be in charge. But, yeah, you do reach a point where you want to have your voice come out.

I produce the way I would love to be produced: In ways to create the best conditions to make your movie, but also to create a space in which the director calls the shots.

As far as writing or directing a film, I've worked with enough people who have done that that I know it's just a whole other level of responsibility and chaos and murder that I could not see happening. For now, I'm just going to see what comes. I know what I like and what direction I have.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.

Once you've agreed the script, you must be willing to go as far as it needs to go on set.

With Kubrick and most film directors, they are in complete control, but one can influence them.

All these directors, and I would include the Coen brothers and Quentin, have a very unique vision of what they want. They listen to ideas and make people feel like everyone is making the film.

I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

When I'm writing a movie, it's usually pretty close to what the movie is going to be, which is just a luxury of being a writer-director.

Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.

Director of any film is very important, and an actor has to leave himself in his hands to mould.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.