Jim Sullivan Quotes

It's very tough when two creative people are together.

When you have an author and an auteur, it's a difficult and challenging relationship.

But we wanted to work in a way we never had, which was write everything together. We had to face each other in the same creative room, which gets tougher as you get older, because you don't want to be confrontational.

The real drawback when you write with a partner is that where you want it to go and where they want it to go is similar, but not exactly lined up, and that's where it's going to lead you into trouble.

Creatively, I thought we were still viable and could do more records. But our working relationship just wasn't happening at all, and our chemistry as people broke down because of that.

Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.

In an ideal world, as a director, you usually wish you could do your own thing and not have to take anyone else's point of view into account, but occasionally you work with someone like Robyn, who brings a new set of ideas to the table, and the whole ends up much greater than the sum of the parts.

When you're in this music thing, and you got friends involved in this, of course ya'll gonna have disagreements, and that's gon' be the outcome: we gon' fight each other.

Working with friends isn't easy - the nature of an artistic project means it's about two strong visions colliding and a bit of mental wrestling.

Co-directing is not possible with my brother. We have very different opinions.

Sometimes two artists wanna work together, but it doesn't mean it's gonna happen, because you have to find the right idea.

Certainly when, you know, you put a lot of creative people together, there's ego and tension and all that stuff comes into play. But on the flip side, there's a lot of camaraderie and closeness.

Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get there. When it's already there from the beginning, it's such a plus.

You have to really work with someone who you think is going to be a collaborator, who you think understands what you want to do with this movie and how you want to do it.

I never co-write. I've tried it before, and I just can't do it.

Bruce Willis. Pain in my ass, no problem about that. We just didn't get along. We got along off camera, but shooting we just didn't get along.

I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.

Tim and Fritz Lang I loved working with. Not Hitchcock so much. There was no communication.

I would love to work with Tim Burton. I think we would be very good together.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

It's only been a couple of times in my life that I've really locked horns with actors. It did not hurt the films, it just hurt the moment of the filmmaking.

Two actors who have different motivations and skill sets can work together and be magic. Charles Grodin and Robert DeNiro technically couldn't work more differently, and yet they made 'Midnight Run,' which is a genius comedy.

As always in a musical collaboration: One has to like each other. As simple as that.

This is one of my lesser moments, and one I'm not proud to admit to, but there's always a time I feel the need to have control over the process and try to defend the song from the person I'm writing with. It never, ever helps and always causes problems.