Ian Mckellen Quotes

My greatest strength as an actor is that I follow my director's brief completely. The film is always the director's visual baby.

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.

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

I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

When I sign on for a project, I'm there to give the director all the material he or she might need to tell their story, and that's the number one priority.

When the director has a vision for a piece that I've never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals, and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they're trying to create.

There is often a great disparity between a director's personal style and the movies he makes.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

As an actor, you have to believe in the point of view of a director; as a director, you have to be able to express what your point of view is and invite everybody to join you on that journey. So it's always about opening up.

Yes, I do bring something of my own to the plate. But I strongly believe that a film is a director and writer's vision.

That's the best way to work on a project: talk to the director. In the end, it's the director's idea of how they perceive the movie and how they perceive the characters.

I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense.

Working with a great director is wonderful for an actor because it means that you're not forced to take the advice of an idiot.

Every director works differently but one thing's important: they must have a vision. If they don't have a vision I don't care how they work.

I don't have a lot of experiences like this where every time I thought I had a good idea it was totally wrong. I had to give in completely and just try to make the movie Alejandro Amenábar was trying to make.

As a means of supporting experiential element in film, once I begin to work on a particular movie I consider myself to be the tool of the director.

Sometimes things are nothing on paper, but a genius director turns it into something amazing.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise, etc. Even if you do, sometimes there's a side of things that don't necessarily gel the way people intend. So there a bit of a mystical entity, film.

Even if I loved the script, the director has to be right because it's all about the filmmaker. It's their vision. They're the ones that go back into the editing room and reassemble the film.

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

My analysis of the situation was that Roman Polanski wasn't trying to break us down or get a performance out of us by destroying us. He was absolutely, very simply, trying to recreate this clear picture in his head. And the pictures he creates are absolutely perfect, and they are exactly what he saw in his head.

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic.

Your director is your everything and you devote yourself to them and you want to help create their vision.

I'm working on a project called Lemons, produced by Killer Films. The director has a great perspective on character development.

He [Oliver Stone] is great. I really like working with directors who know what they want and aren't afraid to tell you, "Do it like this. Don't do it like that."