Debbie Allen Quotes

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.

I think you should make movies as long as the story dictates.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

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

When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.

When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.

I really enjoy being behind the camera. A ton of projects I've done that are my most favorite projects would be where I actually executive produce and I'm behind the camera.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

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.

There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.

I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.

I still have my talent to produce and direct.

If I can have the opportunity to go into an editing room, it's like the golden ticket for me. All I want is to learn about everything else in the filmmaking process. I just directed a music video which just came out and that'd sort of be the area of the field that I'm going to move into, I hope.

As far as writing or directing a film, I've worked with enough people who have done that that I know it's just a whole other level of responsibility and chaos and murder that I could not see happening. For now, I'm just going to see what comes. I know what I like and what direction I have.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.

If you are making a record, you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut,' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

I never know going in if I've even got a movie to make. Once you start making a film, you hope there's going to be enough material! My job as a director is always to push for more.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

I think films are bigger than structure.