Stephen Frears Quotes

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Sometimes, watching someone and... Like, for myself, I got a chance to meet Muhammad Ali. He invited me to his hotel, and I got a chance to take photos with him. It was the most awesome moment of my life.

Muhammad Ali meant everything to me. He inspired me to box after watching re-runs of him winning a gold medal in the Olympics and being a world champion.

I had it calcified inside me that that was the ultimate state of composing. Being Brian Wilson. Being simultaneously a genius and sort of lost at sea - not really knowing what you're doing but reaching for the stars.

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Sometimes I have good ideas. I love that part of our job. It's a constant process of searching, of exploring stuff, and realizing things. You can be in the middle of the film and it's like, "Oh my God! I think we need to do this! Maybe in this scene she should shave her head!"

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

The last thing I want to do is having someone get behind a Montgomery Clift biopic, and then just do the first script that came out. Sometimes it takes a long time for these things to gestate. And I'm only going to do it if it's the right story that's told for the right reason, and that's relevant to this day and age, as much as it pays homage to who this man was. Should that happen during the time when I'm still young enough to play him, perfect. And if not, hopefully someone else will get to play him because I do think it's an incredible story.

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

You can't be a proper writer without a touch of madness, can you?

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter.