Bille August Quotes

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

You're always just trying to make your film, tell the story you're trying to tell - best you can, you know.

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.

I've always been a relaxed person on set, but I think the main thing is I think about it from an editing point of view way more than I did before.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

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.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

In film or TV work, you can have this amazingly dramatic pause, and they'll just edit it out.

When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I have considered the directing, actually. Not so much the writing. That is not really interesting, but the directing is really interesting to me.

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.

Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

It's sort of one ongoing process where writing ends and directing starts.

Having spent a lot of time on sets, I was really interested in the overall storytelling aspect of shows and projects.

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

I fell in love with film and its potential. The idea of putting one image next to another image and creating meaning blew my mind.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

There are so many details in a movie that it's amazing how much work you'll do to change what adds up to not that much material.

What I realized is that it doesn't matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it's still the same thing. It's still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.

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.