Cameron Crowe Quotes

I'm an actor's director.

The directors I respect are the ones who have a collaborative attitude, who collaborate with actors.

I love test screenings. Some directors don't, I know. But I love it. I think it's because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they're responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful.

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

Every director works differently but one thing's important: they must have a vision. If they don't have a vision I don't care how they work.

Every time I act in something, I learn something about what the director is doing. One feeds the other.

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator.

Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up.

I had a whole new respect for directors.

My analysis of the situation was that Roman Polanski wasn't trying to break us down or get a performance out of us by destroying us. He was absolutely, very simply, trying to recreate this clear picture in his head. And the pictures he creates are absolutely perfect, and they are exactly what he saw in his head.

I think if I were asked to do as many as fifty takes, I would assume the director had no idea what he wanted, and was just hoping, eventually, to see it.

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

You never know as a director what other directors do. Because you don't get to see what they do.

Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

I really love the experience of moving things around, in terms of being a director.

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

I am still very surprised that I managed to make that film [Close Up]. When I actually look back on that film, I really feel that I was not the director but instead just a member of the audience.

I am impatient with directors who don't know what they want, and the way you don't know what they want is because they want to do one more. "Let's do one more." So, "What for?" I guarantee you there's not going to be a change.

You need an audience to help you figure out what's working and what's worth putting on your album or your special - or even just what's worth touring with.

There's very few directors that know what that rehearsal's for. And often it's just about calming down the director. If he could see it or she sees it, she goes oh, it's going to be okay.

I've always looked at directing as the next step for me in my creative career, and after spending the better part of the last decade on a television set absorbing as much as I could from in front of the camera, I'm now eager to learn as much as I can from behind it.

I generally don't involve myself in giving the actors some tips on acting. At the same time, I don't do that with the director.

I have been directing and involved in producing and the creating of films for quite a while as well as acting. I always think in terms of what the director needs, and not just for this scene but for the film.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

When I was on set I tried not to bug Steven Soderbergh too much. "Why did you put the camera there?" But he was very open to my questions and definitely being on his set was really thrilling because he's such a master.