Mark Waters Quotes

A film is a director's vision... there is, however, much input an actor or actress can have.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.

Yes, I do bring something of my own to the plate. But I strongly believe that a film is a director and writer's vision.

I always try to approach a film from the point of view of the director.

My greatest strength as an actor is that I follow my director's brief completely. The film is always the director's visual baby.

As a director, I love being able to really be a contributing factor to the overall vision of a project.

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

I approach film no differently than I approach a role. I want to make sure the movie is right, the characters are right, I can really bring something to it as a visionary, a storyteller. It's great to point a camera, but can you tell a story?

'Super 8' was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun working with J.J. Abrams, who I think is a kid in a grown man's body, which is a great ingredient for any artist in our business. You have to be a kid at heart to be able to make believe, and his imagination is phenomenal.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

Hitchcock had to fight to the death to make his movies.

Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.

I don't make films to reproduce reality.

My approach to working in movies is to empower the director to have power over me and to really support his vision because he's the guy, at the end of the day, who's going to put it all together.

The dream, I think, with any project is it starts with an idea, and then somebody writes it, and the writer hopes that a director comes on and makes this piece of material visual, and both the director and writer hope that they can have actors come in and bring something to it that neither one of them expected, elevating it along the way.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

To David Lynch, any film or television show should be life casting a shadow.

I loved working with Stephen Frears. He's a really fantastic director. He knows what he wants and how to get it.

Essentially, it is the director who is the creative head of a film. The final authority on all decisions lies with the director. That is how it should be. And then other team members can give their creative inputs.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

My greatest dream is to make a film on 'The Fountainhead,' which I have been restraining from doing because it is so much in the mind, and I am yet to be able to decode that.

I think we shouldn't be shy of thinking that we can interpret text like a movie again, depending on the point of view and what we do with it more than anything else. Of course a lot of remakes of important films, particularly of horror films, they suck.

This is my real concern: to give each film a unique individuality.