Woody Allen Quotes

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It's abandoned or it's ripped out of your hands, and it's thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It's a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, "That's exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I'm going to put it out there."

[Martin] Scorsese says one of the great things he loves about it is how Mark can't get the right shot and he's killing people because he can't get the right shot. It's an example of what film-makers are like.

My point was that it's hard to make good films, but I'm not under any illusion that you do all the time.

More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.

Most people don't really understand what it takes to get a film made, and the struggles .I think anyone who makes a film goes through their own set of struggles.

There are so many things that have to go right for a movie to be good that it's a miracle whenever one is.

I never realised 'The Return' would take so long to make - it was a very tough 'political experience,' and the post production in L.A. seemed to go on forever.

Everything about filmmaking tries to distract you from that first fine rapturous vision you have of the film.

When you're actually making the film, you're constantly battling to maintain its integrity.

If you're a filmmaker, and every time you finish a film, you just naturally go, 'Oh, I could have done so much better,' that's not much fun, is it, really? You might as well go pick another profession if that really is how you derive satisfaction from it.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.

No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance -- and a whole lot of luck.

I honesty feel that each film has its own particular challenges.

Hollywood is a deeply odd place. There are so many factors that have to go perfectly, so many schedules and visions that have to snap together for a film even to be made, much less be good.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

Making a film, you're in a really dark tunnel and the only kind of illumination is the shared experience you're having with your fellow cast and director.

People may be surprised at how hard and difficult filmmaking can be, having the creativity and the technical aspects together is very hard to do.

I used to come home at night full of inspiration, and sit up with a bottle of Scotch. As I wrote, the words seemed wonderful, just too wonderful to be coming from me. Next morning I always found they were terrible and I could never use anything I wrote.

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.

As an artist, you're never happy with anything you do. It's part of the process.

Shooting a movie can be so tedious. You're trying to get 20 different angles on the same swing. You never get into a rhythm. But I took it very seriously.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

Curiously, directing my own films have made me more tolerant and patient. I've always been an extremely impatient actor. Waiting around drove me nuts. But now I'm much more sympathetic to a director's struggle.