director's journey Quotes

I've DP'd so many films for first-time directors, and I know the trauma, the heartbreak, the vulnerability, how much you have to believe in the story.

When I made my first film, I didn't think of it as directing, so it wasn't like I set out to become a director.

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

I have been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years, and in 1970, when I first started directing, I said, 'If I could pull this off, I can some day move to the back of the camera and stay there.'

I used to hang out with a group of aspiring directors before 'Pizza' happened. We used to discuss a lot of stories all the time.

Getting back in the directors chair - there's a sense of like doing something every year. It's not like riding a bike, you're always learning new things, you're gonna face new challenges and when you face new challenges you'll have an answer for them.

Directing a film was something I always wanted to do, something that seemed an inevitability in my development as an actor.

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

I didn't write to become a director, which many people do.

I think since I did Monster I really started understanding how hard it is for first time directors. I think there's a lot of great stories out there, but it's high risk.

When kids like Steven Spielberg were eight and nine and 10, they had little cameras, and that's all they wanted to do. When I was 10, I was in my attic pretending to host my own variety show. Spielberg wasn't. That's why he's a film director, and I'm doing what I'm doing.

On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.

Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you've got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there's no greater feeling.

I wasn't trained as a writer-director. And the projects I write are difficult to finish.

I'm working on a few different films and I'm just searching for the right new story to tell. As a director, you just have to kind of like just get through the first project before starting on the next one.

I maybe need a break, because I feel like I've done every iteration of it, and that's what's been great, you know - 'Mr. Brooks' is so different from 'Friday the 13th,' which is so different from 'The Crazies,' which is different from 'Piranha.' So, I feel like I've kind of covered it across the board.

Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

I've always looked at directing as the next step for me in my creative career, and after spending the better part of the last decade on a television set absorbing as much as I could from in front of the camera, I'm now eager to learn as much as I can from behind it.

Directors go their whole career without being able to tell personal stories and to work with a cast as talented as they are.

In his very first film, Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu makes the kind of journey some directors don't - or can't - travel in an entire career.

The shift for me, after spending a long time trying to take existing projects and bring them to fruition as a director for hire, is going back to where I started as a self-generating director. After trying and failing to get so many things made, I have decided that you've just got to do something you really, really love.