Kenny Leon Quotes

I love being creative. I love acting, but I also love directing because you get to have a vision for the whole and bring that vision to fruition.

When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

It's different being a director. I suppose, especially if it's a story you've written and you feel compelled to tell, in some ways it's a lot easier than acting because you're orchestrating the piece. As an actor, sometimes you're trying to second-guess what people want.

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

Directing is much more satisfying to me than acting.

Directing is an act of interpretation.

I find directing more satisfying.

Being a director is almost like being another sort of character, but you're out of view.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.

I think I have more of a director's brain than an actor's brain, in a way.

I'd made these experimental films but I thought the major chore of a filmmaker was to relate to actors.

Directing is a unique endeavor where you are in charge of so many people. As a writer, it is sort of the opposite.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.

Acting requires emotional flexibility and demands, and directing is more cerebral and managerial and a tactical kind of thing.

For me, the most important thing is the writing - and certainly the director. But if the writing isn't there, it doesn't matter who the director is!

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

Directing feels great; I'm really happy to be doing this.

I would say doing film is all about trust and conviction. It's about believing in an idea.

When you got a great cast around you, it makes the story easier to tell, to be honest.

As a filmmaker, the only way that I understand how to make a film is holistically.

When you write a script, you hope that people will give it life beyond the script.

There's no way I see myself as a director. Direction is far too creative.