Cinematic Control Quotes

With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.

In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.

No matter where I am working, I cannot make a film without 100% creative control and final cut. If there is such a guarantee, I can work anywhere.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

I think I missed all of the wonderful things ... I missed the control that you have in film, and I missed getting it right, really getting it right, the way you hope people will see it. All of the things that people love about theater - the fact that it changes every night and that it's so spontaneous - all of those things just frighten me.

As a producer, I learned not to declare anything about a movie I'm not directing.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

The problem with most Hollywood movies is they don't give the director enough control.

I like the conscious manipulation that a great director can have. When you're both complicit in the manipulation of an emotion.

The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.