Alan Menken Quotes

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

Films are a director's medium. We're all stemming from the director.

Filmmaking is a creative process so there is a lot of collaboration that happens on set between an actor and director, but at the end of the day, we're there to actualize the director's vision and things happen organically.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

I don't direct so that I can have an identity and so I can go on to CGI movies. I had a big identity as an actor, and that's not what I'm looking for from directing. Directing is a whole different goal.

There's a way in which filmmaking is a director's medium and television is a writer's medium, so even as TV gets more cinematic, it's still guided by the writer.

I think films are bigger than structure.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

I think every movie is its own little world, and a director certainly sets the tone.

I view filmmaking as a director's medium.

You ought to have a perspective when you're making a film.

The beauty of doing film is that you construct whatever you do block by block and you can build something that will stay.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

Going to directing wasn't a reaction away from acting as much as it was a move towards something I always wanted to do. Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in the camera and how it worked and why one director would place it in this part of the room and then another would place it in that part of the room.

I've enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn't about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I'm most interested in telling happen to be at.

As the director of a film, as the story teller, you have to keep your voice alive.

Of course I know what works for me and what kind of tone I want my films to have.

I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.

Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he's an editor himself - we cut together. It means he's constantly thinking about my problems while he's filming.

In films, you have to follow the director's vision. Filmmaking is a director's medium. So everything happens as per the script and his vision.

I'm learning about filming, and just conceptualizing as well. I think it's a good artistic inroad, even to music as well.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

My directors of photography light my films, but the colours of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you.