Tony Scott Quotes

A lot of directors in my experience are very receptive. They see what you do first, and then they want to find a place to put the camera, and they tweak you here and there.

I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

We did very little improvisation on camera, and once in a while we did.

I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

No, I'm at full height, I'm in the studio, I can actually catch actors by the eye, it's fantastic.

The way I'm used to telling a story is by looking through the viewfinder and being really close to the actors.

Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.

Mel [Gibson] could stage physical comedy and put the camera in such a way... I mean, we did some really funny stuff, and he had some great ideas about how to do it. It was a delight to work with him in that regard.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

It's funny, when people want things to be very truthful and you're dealing with an inexperienced actor. I'm of the school that believes things like that have to be very carefully choreographed. You need people there to say, "It's going to happen like this."

I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this."

I would love to try my hand at directing and even producing in some kind of way. Something about that intrigues me, but for directing I could completely see myself trying.

I think my strength is to do a take all the way through. I am definitely not someone who can do a sprint. Maybe I am not that smart, but it takes me a while to find the moment, and I like to be pushed toward it.

I was working on other things and I wanted to make a film, and I had some ideas brewing in my head. Brandy's [ Burre] circumstance was such that I didn't really know what was going to happen. That was obviously a surprise, but I knew she was in her mid-to-late thirties and she was starting to really think about her life in a way that really appealed to me, appealed to the women that I know in my life.

To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.

In a way, I managed to get the deepest things, the best things out of people. That's why I'm a filmmaker. If you don't have it in you, you'd better do something else.

Make the movie your way. Surround yourself with people who know more than you.

I've always written my own scripts, I really like doing everything from the beginning and taking it all the way through, I've probably learned that from my dad.

There's a lot of laughing on a horror movie set. They're magical in that way.

Usually I like to make my movies from start to finish in chronological order. As a filmmaker it lets me be able to direct my actors and tell them where exactly they are and go with progression.

It's very true that non-actors feel more comfortable in front of a digital camera, without the lights and the large crowd around them, and we arrive at much more intimate moments with them.

I come from the theater, so for me rehearsal is vital and a way of life. There are many film directors who don't believe in it and some actors who prefer not to rehearse.

I'm really specific in the way that I shoot. I've always had a very good sense of what I need in the editing room.

It's what I wanted to do with my life. Not necessarily just direct Jim Carrey movies, but to direct and act and write and create and along the way discover what it is that I'm about.