Harland Williams Quotes

I wrote 'All is Lost' while editing 'Margin Call'. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.

I like pre-production and post the best. I don't like shooting at all. I find it grueling and tough, but I love post and the whole process of seeing the film finally come together. You start ironing out all the rough spots, and the really bad bits you just throw away. So from day one of post to the last day, you see nothing but improvements.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

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.

It took me a year just to edit 'Shotgun Stories.' Actually, it took me two years to edit 'Shotgun Stories.'

What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.

I have stories that I'd like to maybe one day consider directing, but you need a lot of time to write and put it together.

I don't miss scenes at all the way that I used to miss them when I was younger making a film. It's actually quite fun to get rid of them now.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

Very often, things that people may think come from the writer, very often don't. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to making a movie. When you hear a line of dialogue that sounds kind of tinny, it's pretty easy to cite the screenwriter. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into making a movie.

Of course, a movie is in constant flux.

When you're starting up a show, you don't really know what direction it's going to go.

Film work can be very interesting, but it also can be awfully boring because who creates the film? The actors? No. It is the director. It's his piece of work.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I haven't really tried to write a movie. It's tough to get into that mode.

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.

There are no great scripts - just great films.

While making Genevieve, I learned there could be a lot more to a film than just acting in it.

I love how you can shoot a movie in a month or two or three of four, and it's this encapsulated story that you box up and ship out into the world, and what it is, is what it is.

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

It's always been a lie that it's difficult to make films.

Every movie is unknown.

You could get in rehearsals, pre-production, anything that would actually contribute to the understanding of how a film gets made. I actually find those things increase people's interest in a movie and like that better than worrying about showing the tricks behind the curtain.

I want to make my own films from my own scripts based on stories I want to tell, but they take time to put together.

When you work on a movie, you just have no idea how it's going to come out; you hope it's good, but you don't really know, and you don't see it until about six or nine months afterward, and I saw it and was pretty pleased.