Tom McCarthy Quotes

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

I always say that you should remake flops, not hits.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

Every time I do one I feel like I've never really quite learned anything. I always find that when I'm making a film, I find it a little bit like I'm doing it for the first time.

I always think that you finish one movie, you start a new one, and you think, 'OK. I did that last one. Now I've learned. I know how this works.' Then by the end of the movie, you think, 'No, I don't, really.'

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

You're only as good as your body of work, and everybody has issues, whether it's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. I'm not comparing myself to those guys, but you learn more from the misses than the hits.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

Also, I plan to screw something up on every movie I do so that I can learn from my mistakes and become a better director with each project.

When you're making a film, you don't really have time to consider what the whole of your film is. And then, when you're releasing your film and promoting your film, you're looking at it in a different way. Then, as you move away from it, you start to look at it objectively and think, 'What could I have done better?'

He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.

My first records are integral because I made them, you know, and I'm going to learn from those mistakes.

The most important thing when you do a movie is that you find an audience that really understands what you want to do and is really supportive of it.

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

For me, every film is an interesting experience.

Failure is part and parcel of the process of experimenting with roles and films.

It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.

You've got the movie, distribution, and marketing. All are equally important, so educate yourself on how to do the best you can at each of them.

For film fans to support 'The Imitation Game' means so much to me, the entire cast and film-making team.

I do a film because I would love to be a part of it, but I also think from the audience's perspective. Our profession survives because of our audience.

We've always had ups and downs at Pixar, starting with the high we felt doing something we'd never done - 'Toy Story' - and the low we felt right after when we realized we'd messed a bunch of things up along the way.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

Don't ever make the same mistake twice unless it pays.