Morris Chestnut Quotes

I realized the exciting place was behind the camera with the producer, director and so on.

You can't direct without a good crew.

When you do a movie, you shoot, and then you go away. A lot of the times you walk about from the movie, you say, 'Oh, I get that scene now... Oh, that whole ending - I wish I could have done another shot.'

I've always been fascinated with everything behind the camera and in front.

People don't talk about how hard it is to make a movie. Nobody does. Ever.

As a director, it just makes my life fantastic to work with people like Elizabeth Hawthorne.

Jimmy's Hall' is set in Ireland in the '30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.

When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.

Making 'Sweetback' took an exorbitant amount of energy and time.

Film is like tech starts on the first day of filming and it never stops. There's never a moment when the audience comes in, you're just in tech forever, and I can't stand being on a film set. It's really tedious.

I fell in love with the whole process of making a movie. I loved the sets. I loved watching the actors and the crew.

I think my passion for cinema really started when I was on the set of 'Mud' and my third film 'Joe.' That's when I really started to fall in love with the art of filmmaking.

A movie is like a city. There's, like, 150 people working, and it's all because of something that came out of your head.

You see one scene shot 25 times in one day, which is totally fascinating, but while you're watching it, you're remembering, 'This is what I was thinking when I was writing that part of the book,' and so it brings it all back very gradually as you're working.

There's a lot of magic involved in movies that as a child I really appreciated. So I love bringing my son to set. It reminds me of what I loved doing as a child, and also, as an actor, you have a lot of down time.

I don't know how anyone ever makes a good movie. It's a miracle every time.

There's so many interesting aspects of making a movie: the costume department, the set design, the casting itself, the locations.

One of the great advantages of my time spent in movies and in basically every role possible, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, that I've gotten to see all these different ways that people work and the way movies are constructed from the inside out, from beginning to end.

I think some people have a vague idea, but the general public has no clue what the actual behind-the-scenes of filmmaking is and what this profession is.

I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.

Everything is always against you when making a movie, and if you don't have a solid blueprint that the entire team can get behind and understand and then execute, then you're going to be lost on the set.

The idea of directing my own movie is definitely more challenging than choreography.

The script is so key to making a good movie. But everything is against you when you're making a movie: the logistics of putting a crew out where you need to go, whether the light is fading; if the weather's not right, something's wrong.

I think that people should really understand what it takes to make a film.

Unless it's a song and something fancy, I would rather shoot on location.