Freddie Wong Quotes

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

Every show I've ever, you know, produced, essentially it's the show I want to watch myself.

When you direct a movie, you're basically looking at a story, the way you want to look at it. You bring that director's vision, and I'm totally open for that.

I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.

When it comes to remaking my own films in the English language, I can only imagine that it is a very boring process, I wouldn't ever dream of it.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

Directing is a unique endeavor where you are in charge of so many people. As a writer, it is sort of the opposite.

One quality that a director needs to acquire in Hollywood is to understand the system and figure out how to work within the system to express one's own ideas.

It was always my dream to be a director. A lot of it had to do with controlling my own destiny, because as a young actor you feel at everyone's disposal. But I wanted to become a leader in the business.

I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.

There is a director for a reason, because a director knows what's best for the movie. You just give your director as much as you can to work with, and hopefully, the decisions they make are going to be great.

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

I'm so into making music and being behind the scenes. I'm such a visionary person that I don't see myself being the person in front of the camera or the person in front of the mic.

'The Lobster,' at some point, was my most accessible film. Then I made 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer,' which turned out to be not as accessible as 'The Lobster.' It was the film I wanted to make and the story I wanted to tell.

I like working with directors I respect, who give me freedom but also give me a good base from which to work.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

Become the director, producer, choreographer of your own story

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

As an actor, most of the time, you only have so much say in how, what and where things go. As a director, you really get to paint a bigger picture. You have many more brushes to use.

I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.