Jim McKay Quotes

I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.

I don't actually sit down and write, but I just have a lot of different ideas about films and making movies.

I am very interested in behind the scenes, and I am very creative.

I became passionate about filmmaking. The thrill to make something out of nothing and to go out there to see whether it will work or not attracted me.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

A lot of directors, they're creative, but they're different.

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.

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

After defining an idea of what I want to achieve, through a series of storyboard images, I'll go to the ends of the earth to create it, whether that involves obscure camera lenses or the latest electronic techniques.

No other aspect of filmmaking has tempted me to do a film other than the script and the story itself.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

I learned a lot about filmmaking from my dad. Starting when I was a child, I would listen to my dad as an actor, writer, director and producer talking about films - you know what the treatment would be in the opening, in the middle, and in the ending.

I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.

All the excitement is during the making of a film. Once I'm done with it, I switch to my next project and am excited about that.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

I love filmmaking, and I love the process. And I would rather do nothing else. It's a privilege to be able to paint such big pictures, so to speak.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me.

I enjoy looking at words on paper and visualizing how to make them come to life. As a director, the creative process is really amazing.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

I try to make films that I find exciting. It makes me want to get out of bed at five in the morning, have my make-up done and play for the rest of the day.

Having spent a lot of time on sets, I was really interested in the overall storytelling aspect of shows and projects.