Bille August Quotes

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.

Sometimes you don't want to get married too much to a lot of rehearsing, I feel, when it comes to film, because there's so many technicalities. So if I'm in my head, I've gotten settled on something, I'm gonna have to change it if I get there and something was set that's completely different.

I think there's always this idea in your head, but you have to allow the film to take its own course.

In 'Winter's Bone,' it's literally the director and the camera operator. That's it. Just a super-small Kubrick crew. You know what I mean? Like, 8 people.

Those are fun, especially if they're going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they're not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative.

I think I had the most fun making a movie with 'Dedication,' just because you knew that it was a passion project for everyone involved. We had X amount of days to shoot New York in the cold. No trailers. Just sort of kind of doing it guerilla style in a way.

I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.

It's not that there aren't people who care creatively in the world of television, but there's always a bit more time in making a movie. I always feel films are more of a creative journey.

I love improv. 'Crazy, Stupid, Love,' the script was really great, but the directors were open to letting you try different things. And that felt like a muscle I hadn't exercised in a really long time.

'Senna' took five years, 'Amy' took three years. You try and say, 'Look, there's no deadline.' That's important. Just saying, 'We've got to make the film. And once the film's ready, it will be out there.'

I don't plan my roles or my films.

Some directors work from day to day. I work from moment to moment.

With Fincher, you can take chances and try things. And what happens is that any pretension and preparation you've done, all the square, intellectual work, you can't keep that up for 40 takes. It breaks down, and new things start popping up. This, for me, is the most exciting thing about film-making.

It's really fun when a scene doesn't work.

A lot of directors will do a certain amount of storyboarding and pre-vis, and yet when they get on the set, everything starts to change, and they have new ideas.

I have done theatre, and I enjoy the process of smaller films a lot more. When I do such films, there are certain things which I get to do which are untapped. The scenes give me the liberty to play and mould the character in accordance to the director's mindset.

Somebody who doesn't understand my directing style could be pretty taken aback by it if I start going off the schedule and focusing on something because I'm inspired in the moment.

My shows have room for a bit of improvisation. In a film, you can't have that risk; you can't have someone taking 10 seconds longer.

The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it's not worth fighting about jokes.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.

Generally speaking I would say I enjoy the smaller films more because there's a less sense of pressure and often the material is more unusual. But in "Iron Man" it was kind of like both worlds colliding because there was a lot of improvisation, not that we improv-ed in the scenes but to discover the actual scenes themselves.

Sometimes it depends on the actor or the actress. Sometimes they demand a lot of rehearsals. Sometimes they don't. Making movies is not like making a play, so I guess you can leave some of the work for improvisation when they do the work.

You usually never know what you're going to do when you're making a movie.

While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.

I don't like to plan anything ever because it never seems to work. I'm just really...let's just get this film out and see how this one does.