Quotes About Filmmaking

“You may love football, but that doesn't mean you have any business trying to play the sport. It's the same thing with filmmaking ... everybody has a great idea for a movie, but do you have the stamina to get good at your craft and deal with how heartbreaking it is?”

— Adam Green

“Some men don't gel when it comes to work - you have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of views, different methods of filmmaking - and we didn't gel.”

— Antoine Fuqua

“The actual process of filmmaking, the many hours out of your life- it is very slow and boring. I'm not interested in that now unless an opportunity was provided for me.”

— Rick Moranis

“I have been a director who has starred, participated on both sides of the filmmaking process.”

— Keenen Ivory Wayans

“The horror genre is important because it promotes experimentation in filmmaking.”

— Richard King

“There are a lot of aspects of filmmaking that I love, but one of my favorites is in post, finding the right song for the right moment.”

— Gina Prince-Bythewood

“Games have has as much an impact on Hollywood filmmaking as MTV music videos did.”

— Bruce Feirstein

“People ask me about 'The Hurt Locker' a lot, and it's an incredible piece of filmmaking - as are 'Band of Brothers' and 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Apocalypse Now.' But they're not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood's idea of war.”

— Sebastian Junger

“Austin is almost a million people, but it still feels like a relatively small town. Everybody knows each other. Or at least everyone in the filmmaking community.”

— Gabriel Luna

“Filmmaking has always involved pairs: a director coupled with a producer, a director alongside an editor ... The notion of couples is not foreign to cinema.”

— Luc Dardenne

“I came to filmmaking because it's my passion. I decided I can't have it distorted or marred by someone else deciding what it should be.”

— Shane Carruth

“Filmmaking is a miracle of collaboration.”

— James McAvoy

“Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.”

— Jason Reitman

“'Jaws' was the definitive filmmaking turning point for me. It came out in the summer of '75 and I saw it an obsessive 55 times. They even ran a very embarrassing article about me in the local paper, about the weird kid who's seen 'Jaws' 55 times.”

— Victor Salva

“I always wanted to be a filmmaker and became one through sheer single-mindedness. I came to filmmaking from a background in graphic design. I went to film school at Newcastle Polytechnic.”

— Neil Marshall

“I want to put everything I think I've learned about filmmaking and storytelling and put it to the test in other areas.”

— Peter Jackson

“Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.”

— Graham Moore

“I feel like I'm still learning a lot. I think there's a tendency for people who are just doing their first couple of films that I see now where they seem to be really resentful of the technical limitations that come along with filmmaking.”

— Anna Kendrick

“My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways, staying outside of it is easier for me.”

— Harmony Korine

“Acting is always at the core of my life, but I'm also excited about producing. I'm excited about directing, and I have a life in the filmmaking world, and so I want to explore all aspects of it, not just the acting, but acting is the root.”

— Nicolas Cage

“Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid. I would see a movie and think: 'I'm gonna make that movie.'”

— Noah Baumbach

“I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.”

— Neill Blomkamp

“When I say that I am going to do an American film, I didn't want to suddenly go off into a completely different world that which bears no relation to the style of filmmaking that I'm used to.”

— Park Chan-wook

“Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with 'The Jazz Singer' or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.”

— John Lasseter

“Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.”

— Peter Landesman

“My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.”

— Joshua Oppenheimer

“I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.”

— Joshua Oppenheimer

“My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.”

— Steven Spielberg

“Nothing has changed that much, even during filmmaking for 'The Descendants.' I wrote. I took the kids to school. I cleaned the house. And I had dinner with George Clooney.”

— Kaui Hart Hemmings

“'Beatrice Cenci' was an amazing film. If it were released today it'd win Best Picture. It's so well done, it's so contemporary, and the filmmaking is so smart.”

— Eli Roth

“Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.”

— Darren Aronofsky

“To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.”

— Don Hertzfeldt

“Filmmaking, like sex, isn't a polite enterprise. It involves a lot of mess and the bottom line is, if somebody ain't screaming, you're not doing your job.”

— James Woods

“I'm a believer that people need to understand that filmmaking is not a perfect process for anybody. It is a process in which you find the film and the film finds you. And that is every film.”

— Jason Reitman

“I'm not interested in being famous or anything, but I'm definitely interested in expressing emotions, and acting and filmmaking can be great outlets for that. Filmmaking is an incredible art.”

— Ellar Coltrane

“I found my father's Super8mm film camera when I was around eight years old and started shooting with it. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but that's really where my filmmaking began.”

— Gabriel Campisi

“For me writing and filmmaking is a therapeutic process. It reflects themes that I'm going through at a time in my life.”

— Mark Webber

“The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.”

— Mike Nichols

“Los Angeles is Hollywood and Hollywood is Hollywood Blvd. It's the first thing you want to see. It's the only thing really that you know about as far as Los Angeles is concerned. And so you go and you look at Joan Crawford's hands and feet and the whole history of American filmmaking is encapsulated in that one little area on that one street. That street, to me, has always been the street of dream.”

— Helen Mirren

“I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”

— Herschell Gordon Lewis

“This is such a cliche, but I feel like filmmaking is a collaborative experience.”

— Steve Antin

“I earn my living by teaching film, mostly filmmaking but also teaching courses on current cinema. I'm interested in movies. I hope that's not all I'm interested in. In that sense, it's maybe a little misleading. I don't expect to make another movie about films, but I may continue to write about them.”

— Thom Andersen

“I went for a more classical approach to filmmaking with lots of dolly, track and cranes, and slightly slower, more choreographed fight moves, so you get more fight moves in one take.”

— Paul W. S. Anderson

“I'm a film geek man. I love toys. I love everything in filmmaking, so for me to just be around this technology is just so cool to watch it being used for the first time, some of the stuff.”

— Zach Braff

“Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.”

— Peter Mullan

“Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.”

— Ingmar Bergman

“The Woodstock Film festival is among the finest of a dying breed: a festival that isn't trying to sell you anything, but simply and beautifully celebrating the art & craft of filmmaking.”

— Ethan Hawke

“The majority of the filmmaking process is in pre-production. The more you've planned out the more freedom there is on set to find new stuff, to play around, find new jokes and let the actors kind of breathe - but it needs to come from a place where it's completely structured.”

— Vin Diesel

“I never really cared much for Hollywood or movies. But the curiosity for filmmaking, and expanding myself as an actor and my curiosity for people and portraying them, just has grown. And that's from simply being involved in the industry. But it was never a goal of mine as a kid.”

— Heath Ledger

“My god is narrative filmmaking.”

— Darren Aronofsky