Collaborative Filmmaking Quotes

Every big-budget film is powered by a director's vision. I blindly follow the instructions of my director, believe in him, and deliver what he exactly wants from me.

Shooting a film with seven to eight actors together is complicated sometimes because you have to cover everybody.

It's great when improv is encouraged. It's a really fun thing. It depends on who's in the movie and how their process works as well. It takes a director who is open to that because you have a script, but then something funny could happen on set.

I believe in giving actors the freedom to express themselves, and adding more to whatever is written.

It's ludicrous to think people work for you: 'a film by...' doesn't exist. Directed by, maybe, but it's a film from a collective, a group of people whom you consult and seek your counsel and advice and vice versa, too.

I have a film I want to direct. Gena Rowlands was going to do it with me a long time ago. It's about an older woman who's running a ranch in the west the old fashioned way.

The thing I've come to learn is that what's great about small independent films is the intimacy and the communication that occurs when you're making them.

I'd like to be a director who gives my actors complete freedom while collaborating with them to find performances.

It's strange - some directors are really talented but they can be so precious when it comes to letting you be a part of it.

The Coen brothers: Of all the directors I've worked with, they're the only ones who have given me the storyboards attached to the script. It was very cool for me, because I knew when I was in close-up or if it was far away, and it also made me know that anything that happened in the edit wasn't personal. Because they edit their own movies, so they were editing it as they went.

In terms of watching other directors, it's more like I go on set now, and I'm prepared, as an actor, and ready to give them everything, but at the same time, you observe how everybody else does it because there's always something to learn.

Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.

There's a reason why actors are always dying to work with the Coens. They just set the stage for you to do their best work.

Somehow, even though you have less time and less money, the thing about making indie films is somehow you have another kind of resource: a human resource, where you can really look to your creative colleagues and actually ask questions that are honest.

The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.

I have always accepted films based on what my role is. Of course, I do look at who is playing the lead opposite me, the producer and the director.

There's a different set of writers and a different director for the films, but Marvel has turned it into a pretty spectacular job.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

I'd love to make a movie with Tom Hardy. If we ever got the chance to make a Venom movie together, that would be super-cool, but his movie would have to take place in the MCU because I'm not giving up my ticket in the MCU.

It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

When you make a movie with Alejandro Amenábar, he very quickly... it was very clear you're kind of operating in his dream universe.

In an ideal world, as a director, you usually wish you could do your own thing and not have to take anyone else's point of view into account, but occasionally you work with someone like Robyn, who brings a new set of ideas to the table, and the whole ends up much greater than the sum of the parts.

You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that's good.

Having a director who is also an actor makes for that very relaxed way of working and it's empowering.

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.