Set Management Quotes

A lot of producers now are people who stay in their office and never go to the set. I don't know how you can be the advocate of the movie if you're not there in it every day.

When I finally made it to the set, I spent a lot of time doing damage control on The Magic Christian.

Producing is easier, I can just be at the set overseeing the story.

As a director, you want to be really connected to every part of your set, from your actors all the way to your camera operators. Everybody is a part of the creative process, and if they feel like they're part of a team versus just being a tool, they're going to give you something special.

If the world ran the way a crew runs a set, we'd have a better, more progressive world.

I always get everyone prepared so there aren't so many arguments on set. I have a policy that the first thing I do in the morning is go over to the trailers and discuss exactly what we're shooting that day. It's time-consuming, but it reduces the chances of 'misunderstandings' on set.

I think that for the actors, the last thing that they want is a director that's not watching, a director that goes 'Okay, it sounded good to me,' and they were doing something else or preoccupied with something else because they were worried about the light changing.

It can really vary from movie to movie what the producer's role is and there are all kinds of producers. There are line producers who do a lot of the nuts and bolts work on the set.

As a director, you have to know what actors are doing. You're the one telling them what to do. The actors' job is to come prepared to the set, but sometimes, if they're beginning actors or people who are non-actors, you have to teach them how to act.

I've directed seven movies and know a thing or two about dealing with unexpected crises.

When I go on the set, I'm so rushed. When I see the actors at rehearsal, when I love it, I want to keep the mood - my mood and the actors' mood also. So I have to push the crew faster. I don't want to lose the mood.

I loved working with him [Justin Chadwick]. He was very smart in how he assembled the people around him and had a crew that he knew very well. He was very comfortable on the set and I never felt that I was working with a first-time filmmaker.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

All we're in control of is what we do day to day on set and how we prepare to do our job each day.

A director should be in a position where he is only directing. On the sets, he is only looking at the performances, thinking 'How I am going to shoot this?'

Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set.

When a bunch of stuff is happening on set, you have to remember the grander purpose: you're telling a story, so you have to get to that moment, and that takes supreme focus.

I travel light as a director. I don't have monitors on my set.

Everybody that's on a set - from the director to the grips to the electricians - it's all about problem solving. So, as empowered as you can make everybody feel, that's really important.

When I'm making a film, I don't want my producer to be on the sets. So when I'm producing a film, I don't want to be on the sets!

The director is the only person on the set who has seen the film. Your job as a director is to show up every day and know where everything will fit into the film.

I've been on a lot of sets, and I've been around a lot of directors, and I've been working for many years now, but stepping in the shoes of being the decision maker and the guy that everybody is relying on at some point, yeah, it was challenging for sure. One thing is that you're responsible for a large group of people.

I started working on how I would direct this a year before we started shooting "All We Had" and I was prepping, acting, and directing sort of at the same time. I knew that I didn't want to hold people up on set.

I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.

There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set quite appropriately and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. When you're directing, you don't need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do." And, you know, and I WOULD be there behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn't even aware of.