Lee Unkrich Quotes

Big movie or small movie, you make this thing, and then you show it to people, and you just hope they like it. You hope it works.

It's a great privilege to make a film, to have it shown, and for people to see it.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.

No one sets out to make a bad movie or disappoint anybody.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

'Rocket Science' is really where I fell in love with filmmaking, I think 'Camp' was incredible, but it was so bizarre, and I was trying to find my footing in this world where you don't have an audience for immediate validation.

Every time you work, it's a new film, and generally when you work with auteurs, people that write and direct their films, there's always an originality.

I don't want to make a movie till I have an idea I have to make. I don't want to make a movie just to make a movie.

I strongly believe cinema is popular culture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's life.

A film is between you and the audience. The distributors are the only people in between us. It is a straight equation.

Whenever you do a film, it's always like a little miracle. So many people getting together trying to do something so that the audience can be entertained.

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

We always set out to just make a great movie.

I would never make a film because I think it's going to be a box-office success.

When I listen to a basic thought, I try to visualise the cinema in it. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes boyish, sometimes amateurish. It is a trial and error method. But the bottom line is that I want to entertain the audience.

I think making a film that you think is good and you believe in is going to be difficult forever.

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

At the end of the day, you are doing the film for the audience.

I never wanted to make movies just for me. I want to make movies that people watch.

I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.