Directorial Role Quotes

I am aware that as an actor, I can blame others for the failure of a film, the director, the script, choice of co-stars, timing of the release and so on. But now, as the director, I will have to shoulder all the blame.

I view filmmaking as a director's medium.

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.

There is an isolated experience to being a director. It's very communal because there's a crew, but it's only you. You're the one on the hook.

The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.

Our job as directors is to really give the audience a sense that all this exists in a universe somewhere. Even if it's a slightly more stylized or comedic world than we live in, it's still really important that it has an authenticity and integrity to it.

A director is a choreographer, both politically and creatively.

To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there's a cinematographer, there're costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble.

[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.

I had always wanted to don the director's hat and was waiting for the right time.

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

I'm thinking about directing, but I know it's a lot of work and I appreciate what directors do and I would like to be good at it. The opportunity has presented itself four to five times, and I usually said no because of the script.

Hong Kong people, they treat me more like a director, like a producer, like a filmmaker. If they recognize me, they treat me as a producer more than a star. And also, I make one movie in three years. I think they already forget who I am, because I've been away too long!

All you can really do as director is sort of set a tone.

I think with the smaller-scale projects, the burden for success falls more squarely on the shoulders of the actors and the director and the script.

As the director, I try to go in and know as much as I can about the material. I really try to go in and understand what all the characters are about, what the movie's going to look like.

I always wanted to direct a film.

I think that's the job of a director really, to sort of funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.

I've heard directing talked about as being a benign dictatorship, and I think that's probably the best way a director should be. They're open to collaboration and feedback from people, but ultimately, it's got to be that one person's vision. That's what I think makes a film really stand out.

If you have the right actors and you can give them the freedom to explore, you've done a lot of your work as a director.

Whatever it takes, the job of the director is to be the leader and to get your actors where they need to go. That's a philosophy that I have.

Deep down, all directors feel like frauds - because it's built into the nature of the job. You're the jack of all trades and the master of none. The cameraman knows the camera, the sound man knows the sound equipment - and you? You can't do anything: You can't do the acting, you can't dress the set, you don't record the sound or shoot the images.

Becoming artistic directors is an enormous responsibility and not one that we take lightly.

I'm always in awe of directors because they're just holding so much stuff in the air. They've got so many decisions that they need to be making and they have to have the complete overall look of what the piece of artwork is.

It's pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn't.