Directorial Influence Quotes

'Jurassic Park' is like 'Star Wars.' Different directors can give a different taste to each movie.

I have realised I am a director's actor.

We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

It's interesting to help someone find their vocabulary. There would not have been a De Niro without a Scorsese.

I've been aware of the work I do as an actor being directorial in feel.

I think every director has a different take, some are good, some are bad. The directors you get on best with sometimes don't make the best films, so who's to say who is right.

There were years when Hitchcock was like a master to me, but now I think he's so artificial. I can watch films and say how technically beautiful they are, but I'm not impressed by any technicality.

At the end of the day, you're handing your performance over. If a director says after a take, 'You know what, try it just really angry. Just get furious'... you're like, 'Well, I don't know if I want to give you that because I don't know if I trust what you're going to do with it.'

As an actor, you can go in, and you give your best performance, but if you hand that performance to ten different directors and ten different editors, you get ten different movies.

Male directors always project their own desire of women - how they want a woman to dress, to do her hair. With a woman director, it's more a projection of herself.

I feel whatever an actor does on screen is something the actor 'does,' and what the director can do is to tell, talk or instruct. So, all the credit for an actor's performance goes to the actor alone.

I'm analytical as an actor, and one of the things Quentin did was free me from that.

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

I mean, I'm always happy to be compared with Scorsese!

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

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

I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.

Any director who comes into a revival owes a great deal to the original director. If I know the backbone works, it gives me, as a director, much more freedom to bring something new to it or try something different.

I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.

Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.

If films could run because of performances, everybody's films would do well. It is the director who makes the film.

Movies are a director's medium, and they end up getting less credit than actors. They get the flak if the movie doesn't do well, and the actor walks away with most of the credit if the film does well.

I won't deny that when you look at a director's work, you are aware of the different works that they have done. For me, what's more important is my instinct about that person.

Live-action films are very much a director's medium, and that director is going to be a very strong voice, a stronger individual voice than you'd have in animation.