Random Filmmaker Quotes

“I am young. I am only 81 years old. I hope I can keep working for another 10 years. Old age is to let oneself become old.” - Youssef Chahine

“A film has to be like a stone in the shoe.” – Lars Von Trier

“I’ve realised that basically I don’t give a shit for society which, in the case of Poland, is forty million people. But what I really care about is the individual human being.” – Krzysztof Kieslowski

“A great film is just enjoyable. There’s nothing complex about it." - Akira Kurosawa

“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”- Stanley Kubrick

“Everything can be put into a film. Everything should be put into a film.” – Jean Luc Godard

“I’d rather entertain and hope that people learn, than teach and hope that people are entertained.” - Walt Disney

“I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.” - Quentin Tarantino

“A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” - Stanley Kubrick

"A film that can be described in words is not really a film.” - Michelangelo Antonioni

“Cinema never saved anyone’s life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone’s life. It is only an aspirin.” – Luc Besson

"Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee." – James Cameron

“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” - Stanley Kubrick

"I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians." – Francis Ford Coppola

"A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn’t intend to be there." – Spike Lee

"Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out." – Martin Scorsese

"I steal from every movie ever made." – Quentin Tarantino

"Most people don’t know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, It’s very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to… As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad – to be willing to risk everything to really express it all." – John Cassavetes

“There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” - Frank Capra

“Take all the money you would spend on film school and just make a film, you'll learn more that way.” -

Quentin Tarantino

"A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again." - Jean Renoir

“A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.” - Coppola.

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly

“If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.” - Alfred Hitchcock

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water." - Robert Bresson

"Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater." - Roman Polanski

"People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God’s sake, I am not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I am making a movie that people are going to look at." - Ridley Scott

"You’ve got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie is good enough, it is going to survive; and if it is not, well, it will not." - Sam Mendes

"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director." - Alfred Hitchcock

"A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him." - Jean Renoir

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

"There is no formula for success. But there is a formula for failure and that is to try to please everybody." - Nicholas Ray