Curtis Hanson Quotes

One of the wonderful things about making a film of any genre is that you have dialogue. You can take up a position. If you want to say something about your position, you can just say it. You don't have to spend massive amounts of screen time.

I don't ask my students to have studied film or any education in general. What I ask them is to come and sit and tell me a story, and the way they choose it and tell it, for me, the best criteria for whether they are right for making films. There's nothing more important than being able to tell your story orally.

I love making genre films. It's something I've really been attracted to since I was a kid, mostly because, as a kid, it was forbidden fruit.

If you decide to direct a film, it's because you have something to say, something to show to the audience.

Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up.

I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it. And it's pretty irritating to get a movie on. So to complicate it by having more irritation as a director, I don't really need it. And because I direct a great deal still, but in the theater, I kind of get that anyway. Which is not at all to say I would never do it again, or it would never happen again.

I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

I always wanted to direct movies. That's what I set out to do. When I was a little kid I just dreamed of making movies, and I went to film school [at Northwestern University].

Writing and directing just sort of fell into my lap.

Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years.

I always think to shoot action scenes is not really about the stunts. It's more about an expression and about imagination.

I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination.

My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?

I love being a part of storytelling, so whether I'm getting to do that on Survivor, or do it through kids' adventure books, or directing a movie, it's all sort of the same: Once Upon a Time...

I think I'm a prudent filmmaker.

I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work.

I wanted to be an actor because it gave me the opportunity to express myself in ways I wasn't comfortable expressing myself, as a kid growing up in St. Louis.

I've always wanted to direct and as I grow and I get older and I get older I just want to let that evolve.

I didn't want to be a director for hire. It really just took me a long time to learn how to direct and to feel up to the job.

I have a real hunger to experience life. I'm really, really inspired by my family. I grew up with my family, really did a lot; we took a lot of road trips, we did a lot of different businesses, we'd always tried stuff. For me, that just kind of sparked something from the time I was a kid.

[Martin Scorsese ] basically works just like any other director. You work the scene, you try to find what's best in it and make it work. That's what it was like.

I think movies say a lot [about real life], even more than theater. It says a lot about the invisible, that movies are so fascinating. The camera lens is like a microscope that goes beyond the surface. It's like you're exploring a secret, so you explore the director's secret, you explore the actor's secret, and therefore you explore the universe's secrets.

I mean, yeah, Anne Fletcher was a choreographer, but she was born to be a director. You need to have the ability to figure out people's rhythms. It all starts from the script.

I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.