Thelma Schoonmaker Quotes

Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.

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've always wanted to be a director; it's just how my mind has always worked. If I hear music, I see music videos and all the shots and setups to edit it all together. If I interact with a person, I'm seeing a whole scene come to life.

I usually take up short films when I am not tied up with feature films. Short films are easier to work on... because it doesn't take much of your time. The number of shoot days are lesser as compared to feature films.

I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail.

The wonderful thing about film is that you have something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and you have a concrete amount of time to shoot it.

I just think a lot of movies are too long. I want to know how to make my movie as tight as possible.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

I want to make a movie where people are, like, 'Whoa.'

I've learned that I really want to shoot short films on a short schedule. There can be very good films that run 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is beautiful.

First hand on 'Go Goa Gone' I learnt how to write on final drafts, how the process works.

There are people who've told me cinema is a visual medium and you don't need to say so much. When I write the script, all these lines of what the characters are thinking are written. Once the film is shot and the lines are dubbed, I tone it down in postproduction if I feel it gets heavy.

In fact, sometimes when a short film is done well, you wish that it could be slightly longer.

I've always felt that I wanted to make a Marvel film... I just want to make sure I'm not making an episode.

Writers are first directors. When directing our own scripts, we would have a better vision and clarity than directing the stories penned by others. I personally think that a writer's job is tough than a director's.

I've requested Anand Raghav to write a full length comedy for me.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

Directing films is easier said than done. The job needs a lot of sensibility to put many things in place.

When you are adapting a book to a visual medium, you tend to leave a few things and add a few new ones.

Showrunning is when you're the constant creative voice in the show. For a year-and-a-half, you are working on the scripts, you're fine-tuning them, you're the final say on the edit, the music and the cast.

You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'

Writing a script consumes so much of time.

There's a great deal of mystery in film editing, and that's because you're not supposed to see a lot of it. You're supposed to feel that a film has pace and rhythm and drama, but you're not necessarily supposed to be worried about how that was accomplished.