John Sayles Quotes

The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you're hanging out with the cinematographer.

With animation, because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want, the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules.

With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.

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.

On films, you have the liberty of working out the details, the psychology, taking maybe more risks and takes than you can in television just because you can't be figuring things out on the day.

The essential nature of all filmed entertainment is that you area always straddling the line of whether or not you can realize something that you want to do.

Ultimately I want to be able to create whatever I want whenever I want. And if that doesn't work, I don't mind just doing weird plays.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

I worked with HBO on 'Recount,' and we had a wonderful experience together. I'm such a fan of HBO and how much flexibility they give in character as well as schedule.

I find that the projects I enjoy signing up to at the moment are with a director who's interested in the script - isn't completely sure what the movie is and isn't concerned about it. He's just interested in going on the journey and discovering it.

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 don't like getting stuck into someone's definition of what you can or can't do with a story.

I've always had an explorative drive to my art, as opposed to wanting to achieve some certain goal.

From a creative perspective, we've been very fortunate in that doing it the 'VGHS' way gave us unlimited freedom. Whatever we wanted to do, however we wanted to do it, we had that.

I wanted to have a creative director crazy enough to say, 'Sure, I'll do a collection in five days.'

I found filmmaking to be a very practical art form. It's about figuring out how to create within the very practical limitations/constraints of time, money, and large groups of collaborators.

In film, it is always collaborative, and so to me, it doesn't make sense to not be collaborative in one of its most critical arenas - which is the screenplay.

When I'm on set, I know what I want.

I never had a boundary as an actor and I am open to interesting scripts.

We're lucky to have such great fans that have stood by us, let us be us and try new things.

My dream was never necessarily comedy. I really wanted to make film or television and was interested in darker stuff over comedy, but I knew I liked dark comedies.

I like creative players and players who do different things.

If I start playing by the rules, I will inhibit myself of the possibilities that lie beyond. I don't like to be framed or given borders to operate in or curtail my thought process and as a writer it's not only my choice but also my need to go beyond the given framework.

It seems so cliched and obvious, but write the movie you want to see in the theater.

The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, 'Well, they'll figure it out!'