Christopher Nolan Quotes

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Film is a living, breathing thing. It's very delicate, and you have to listen and watch for what it tells you.

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

It's the director's job to piece together my performance, his interpretation of my takes, each take, and string them together and make a statement. I'm red paint on a canvas for a painter.

It's one of the things I love about my job: it's my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help.

Instincts are a really important guide for any artist, but particularly filmmakers because it takes a lot to stay true to your instincts as a storyteller.

Most of my work - including everything from my own comics to the covers I've drawn for 'The New Yorker' - is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.

Directing is so dope to me, man, 'cause it doesn't necessarily have to be your material. You're making someone else's material come to life. There's something amazing about that.

Often people going into directing want to learn as much as they possibly can about "technique." And I say the hell with that.

It's different if you're a painter. You can hidethe ones that don't work. You can't do that with movies. They tellthe story of who you are at the time, and that's the wonderful thingabout it.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

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.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

I like directing. It takes a lot out of you, but I'd like to do it again - I just have to find a story I want to tell.

I make movies based on gut.

From the very first movie I ever made to the current time, there have been times between action and cut when I've sensed some kind of new dimension that I haven't been familiar with before.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that's when you get the answer.

I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

I discovered that, in order to write a magnificent piece, you should shoot the images because once you are filming, you are writing the script in your mind.