David Brooks Quotes

John Lee Hancock is someone that I had admired from afar. I think he is a wonderful director... in the tradition I would say both of Clint Eastwood and Frank Capra.

I think one of my favorite directors is P.T. Anderson - living directors, I should say. And Spike Jonze is one of my favorites, Gus Van Sant.

We’re all children of Kubrick, aren’t we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn’t done?

I always wanted to direct. I always saw myself as a director.

[Stanley] Kubrick was a fascinating, larger than life guy who had been a friend for many years prior to our working together on that film. I found the best part of working with him to be the long conversations we had between set-ups.

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

I look at the stories that Spike Lee tells... Great stories. Great director, great storyteller.

The first person to make me realize there was someone behind the film was Steven Spielberg.

Francois Truffaut was my godfather on 'Sugar Cane Alley.' He believed in me and in that story, and told everyone that it should be made.

When How Green Was My Valley finally wrapped, I thought John Ford was a walking god.

'The Color Purple' is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back.

I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name.

It was Howard Hawks who changed my life.

My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.

I love directing scenes that I'm not in because suddenly I really feel like a filmmaker which is a different thing.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

John Huston is more of a creative director than most.

I love so many directors. I love David O. Russell. I love David Fincher, I love Alexander Payne and Jane Campion and my aunt. Spike Jonze. There are just so many amazing directors.

I want to do films and have my name mentioned next to Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. I don't want my name mentioned next to other rappers at all.

And also, Sergio Leone was considered in Italy a director of category B, not a big director.

Nobody makes movies like Oliver Stone.

I did my first film with Francis Ford Copploa, which spoiled the hell out of me.

Friends who are directors like Jim Mangold or the Wachowskis or Zack Snyder - who, whether they know or not - have really left a mark on who I am as a director.

My father, John Marcellus Huston, was a director renowned for his adventurous style and audacious nature.