Auteur Filmmaking Quotes

If you want to be in Hollywood, and if you want to make big international movies, you have to be able to make movies that don't have anything to do with social status or politics. To limit yourself to just do these little small movies and call it black cinema itself is a mistake to me.

Wes Anderson's films, 6-year-olds are crazy about them.

Studios weren't banging on my door to offer me parts... And I thought, well how am I ever going to make movies that speak to my heart and to my values?

Working with Thiagarajan Kumararaja in 'Super Deluxe' was absolutely mind-blowing.

I'm a person who likes these sort of movies... sad but moving 'art movies' that normally are at a festival and then they go to a small art house theater and disappear.

Saw' was a film that James Wan and I came up with back in Australia and we were just hoping anyone, literally, anyone would make that film and if nobody would give us the money we were going to shoot it in a garage somewhere.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.

I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the film-makers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.

The great thing about an independent film is that you're too busy working, and you're too busy hoping to God to get it done.

My job is not to make you happy. As a filmmaker and as an actor, my job is not to make you feel happy. If you're used to those kind of films, don't come and watch my films.

Rather than thinking in terms of a specific genre or specific kind of thing, I hope I can just stay relatively small and keep making my movies. If I can keep writing them and making them, I'll be happy.

I think that if you go about making movies to win Oscars, you're really going about it the wrong way.

I wasn't really sure about the kind of films I wanted to be a part of. That's when I saw 'Aaranya Kaandam.' I was stunned; it was such a stylish film.

Independent films are really the best ones out there. They're the most original stories, and they're very good.

Well, Fellini... there is always Fellini.

There was a phase in my career in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing strange, arty-farty Euro films that were, you could tell, never had much chance of any release anywhere in the world.

Independent films are very hard to get made, but I'm lucky enough to get them made, so I'm going to keep doing it. I like my independence. I like being able to tell a story the way I want to tell a story. I don't like developing it with a team. I like coming to a story and deciding whether I want to do it or not.

I've always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.

I came out of independent film, that's my roots.

In the beginning, it wasn't even a question of deciding I'm going to do independent film and not commercial films - I wasn't being offered any commercial films, and there wasn't an independent scene.

I just try to direct in a way that interests me. And, hopefully, other people will find it compelling.

I don't even watch many huge films. I don't go to the cinema every weekend. I watch selective cinema and want to make my kind of films.