Ang Lee Quotes

I am a fearless filmmaker.

When you take that to the next level of guiding a group of filmmakers to actually depict him, it's even more challenging. The one that that I think everybody involved believes is that we won't move forward with this until we believe it's right. There's no deadline that a movie has to be made by. We have to believe that we have served the responsibility, however long it takes us to get to that point.

Movies are so hard to get made - every step of the way of making a movie has obstacles. If you don't have that passion, if you don't have that vision, if you don't believe it's a piece of art worth making, then you probably won't get it made - you won't have a chance for it to be something special.

When you shoot a film, when it was film, there used to be rushes and normally a director would look at them the next day. All directors look at the rushes, except for Fellini. I asked him why he didn't and said, "Because it interrupts my fantasy." What he was trying to say was that he had a three-dimensional, vibrant, living, volatile fantasy going on in his head, and when he looked at rushes, they were two-dimensional and they killed it.

I believe that humanity now is desperately calling for new ideas. These new ideas must come from spiritual teachers and artists, from poets and philosophers, from educators and ecologists, from postal clerks and miners and traffic cops and nurses and waiters and musicians and cooks and cleaners and from...Regular People Everywhere. That is to say, from YOU.

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.

I think, for me, I'm always more interested in the process of making the movie than the movie itself

To be a good designer, you would need to have deep and far-reaching interests outside of the profession.

It's too hard to make a movie if you don't care about what happens to it, or even what the product is. I can't even imagine that. It's not worth the time and effort if you don't care about the product.

All of the [Bob] Fosse-esque movements and point of view informed years and years of what I would do.

The artist must express the summation of his feeling, knowing and believing through the unity of his life and work.

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

You carry that through and adapt it to a camera lens, but you're quite right, you cannot be sure of what an audience is going to do. You don't know what's going to happen to the piece you're doing anyway. You don't know how it's going to be edited. There are a lot more unknowns in cinema. But that you have to readily accept. That's when, I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.

One of the things about Derek Jarman was that he was a painter who worked alone when he painted, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons he made films was for the company. He made filmmakers of all of us, that's the truth. I don't mean he necessarily made directors, but he made us filmmakers. Because we lived in a state of mutual responsibility for what we made.

When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn't young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I'd ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place.

I hate to use this as a metaphor, but making movies is kind of like going to war. It's not - but the stamina required and what it takes to tell a story that is this big in scope, you need a general that will bring out the best in you.

I really enjoy talking to actors or filmmakers that enjoy that process of creating and how they go about doing it.

Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.

I can't leave India helpless. This responsibility must be taken and I will continue to do so. For all good and bad things, it is my responsibility. I do not regret anything. I believe, people of the country have given me the responsibility and I must fulfill it.

I think it takes a lot of courage to be able to direct a film. If you have that courage and that vision together, and you pick the cast that you believe will achieve your vision, you win.

I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.

As Americans we like to believe that we're loved in international politics or that people like what we're doing. But we also recognize that we have an extraordinary responsibility to do what we think is right, and that sometimes what we do is not very popular.

I have a few things that I have written over the years that haven't been made, but I sort of feel like there was a good reason why they were not made. So I am not anxious to go back and fix them. I don't have something in the desk drawer that I think, "The time is right now. If I just do this, it'll be great." It is kind of out of sight and out of mind. I am thinking ahead rather than back.

A Coach must never forget that he is a leader and not merely a person with authority.