Bob Greene Quotes

Making a movie is like an accelerated version of growing up with someone. You spend so many hours a day with each other, and you're putting your heart into this same effort.

A film is like a mad arranged marriage, with all these people who don't necessarily want to be with each other forced into this intimate, exhausting process.

What goes on between the actor and director is sacred.

My creative partner is a writer, and he's got an executive producing credit on this film. We've made three films together and I would never underestimate the impact of a writer.

I like to just work with great directors.

Obviously I'd love to work with any of these great directors because every time I've worked with them I've gained a tremendous amount as an actor. Each director has his own way of pushing you towards improving yourself.

The dream, I think, with any project is it starts with an idea, and then somebody writes it, and the writer hopes that a director comes on and makes this piece of material visual, and both the director and writer hope that they can have actors come in and bring something to it that neither one of them expected, elevating it along the way.

You cannot sit at home at act. You need a story, a director, you need people to believe in you, to put you through that journey. It is not something you can attain within yourself.

For the first three years, when I was writing, I was doing sessions with a whole bunch of different people all the time every day until I met Lindy Robbins, who kind of mentored me. And then, once you find that, all the pieces come together.

If you don't take it personally, the partnership between producers and directors is very intimate.

Every time you make a movie it's a new and different experience. You learn very little from the past. So, I'm a little bit better than I was when I first started.

The best directors I've worked with, they all have the same thing in common. They're the first to say, 'I don't know.' If you ask them, 'How are we actually pulling off this movie?', they'll just shrug and go, 'I have absolutely no idea.'

If people enjoy the film, it can be really intriguing to see what created that film, how each one of those unique components came together, who the people are who did it and what it meant to them to do it.

A film just doesn't involve actors, a director and a producer, there is also the cameraman, the sound engineer, the music composer, the lyric writer. So many people come together to make a film. When we all feel satisfied with the film that we have created it's a win for all of us.

It's a really unique situation where you just - you make independent films or you make big blockbuster movies, but it's very rare when all of those ingredients come together, and you can really tell a story that you care about with a character you absolutely love with the people you love making movies with.

Making a film, you're in a really dark tunnel and the only kind of illumination is the shared experience you're having with your fellow cast and director.

There were obvious budgetary and time constraint differences. With Jamie Marks is Dead, we were operating on a pretty small finance level. So it was definitely run-and-gun, 16-hour days, every day. I would come back, and I was so exhausted I would fall asleep in my clothes. Obviously, with The Giver we had a little bit more time to take the full three months. So that was different, but in both there was still a creative environment, and by that I mean that it was still collaborative, performance was still valued, and it wasn't lost in the money.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

Well, there's two things I have criteria for doing a film: The script, which is the story, and the filmmaker, and it's a filmmaker's medium. I like really strong directors, and so when I do a film, I'm out there to serve the director, really, which is in turn to serve the script, to serve the director cause he's the one making the film. I relied on Todd Haynes for that.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

I have a hard time visualizing anything, which is why I'm not a director, and which is why I try to work with ones I know have a strong idea in mind.

A lot of work was done with one of my best friends and editor, Spencer Averick, who's edited everything I've ever made from the very, very first documentaries; the very, very first films I made were docs, so we learned the form together.

The artist-muse relationship is romantic and passionate, and complex, and I would imagine that would be a hard relationship to have if you're not with the person. It requires so much of each other, you have to be in love with each other.

I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there.

When you are the avatar for the writer/director, a lot of times, I just trusted him. If he had a choice, even if it wasn't necessarily what was my first impulse, I was like, "Billy Ray has been living with this for two years before I even came on board, so I'm going with him."