Morten Tyldum Quotes

I think if I were asked to do as many as fifty takes, I would assume the director had no idea what he wanted, and was just hoping, eventually, to see it.

I have a couple ideas that I'm banging on for a film. It's strange, you make a movie and, all of a sudden, your agents are calling you and saying, "Hey, I know these guys with some money who are looking to finance something." You're like, "Oh, god, now I've gotta come up with something really amazing."

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.

When you write and direct your own film, you basically know exactly what you want. Or you hope to. For the studio, it actually can make life a little easier, because if you have a bunch of questions, they only need to call one person.

With 'The Last Picture Show,' Peter Bogdanovich brought the script to the company that made it. They liked it, and they gave him the money he needed to make the film. He cast it with the actors that he thought were right for the parts. Now, it's the reverse.

I really enjoy talking to actors or filmmakers that enjoy that process of creating and how they go about doing it.

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.

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

Making 'Coraline' was one of the great filmmaking experiences of my life.

All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

What you do is get the right director and the right screenwriter and the right cast. It's a fantastic job.

You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.

I suppose directing on set is the most fun because it's a good crack and you feel you're on the battlefield whereas writing is a fairly solitary undertaking.

The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.

The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I've done before and hopefully it becomes a good movie.

Frankly speaking, it's only the script that matters to me the most. If I like the script, then I just commit to myself and go ahead with it. But I also look at the commitment and confidence of the director of the film because it's him who will shape the film.

To me, the director is the most important, rather than the story.

I never know going in if I've even got a movie to make. Once you start making a film, you hope there's going to be enough material! My job as a director is always to push for more.

You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.

When you make a movie, you can only make the movie that you would want to see.