Filmmaker Quotes

• A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Movie, Order, Should Have

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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  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

  Cameras, Sound, Ridiculous

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Without the benefit of Google, ask anybody to name more than five female filmmakers that have made more than three films. It's shockingly hard.

  Leslye Headland

  Names, Google, Female

  "The Women of Hollywood Speak Out" by Maureen Dowd, www.nytimes.com. November 20, 2015.

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• Art is our weapon.  Culture is a form of resistance.

  Shirin Neshat

  Art, Culture, Weapons

  "Art in exile". TED conference, www.ted.com. December 2010.

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• Pain is temporary, film is forever.

  Michael J. Fox

  Funny, Movie, Pain

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• There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

  Frank Capra

  Movie, Inspiring, Sin

  Recalled on his death in People, 16 Sep 1991.

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• When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

  Sergio Leone

  Funny, Movie, Humorous

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Always remember, your focus determines your reality.

  George Lucas

  Inspirational, Business, Positive Thinking

  Patricia C. Wrede, George Lucas (2012). “Star Wars®: Episode I: The Phantom Menace”, p.118, Scholastic Inc.

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• My three Ps: passion, patience, perseverance. You have to do this if you've got to be a filmmaker.

  Robert Wise

  Patience, Perseverance, Passion

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• 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

  Inspirational, Motivational, Friends

  James Cameron, Brent Dunham (2012). “James Cameron: Interviews”, p.117, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I don't think of myself as a director or writer. I think of myself as a filmmaker.

  Conrad Hall

  Thinking, Directors

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• No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

  Frank Capra

  Dark, Two, People

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• You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

  Peter Bogdanovich

  Movie, Inspiring, Real

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• Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

  Billy Wilder

  Inspirational, Motivational, Movie

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

  John Malkovich

  Movie, Actors, Rehearsal

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• Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Jobs, Care, Obsession

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• I love awards, especially if I get them. It's up to the courage of the filmmakers to make art in cinema, not just business. John was rejected by studios, he borrowed money and did movies with his own money. You're either courageous or not. You have to find a way.

  Ben Gazzara

  Art, Awards, Cinema

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• Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.

  Cameron Crowe

  Writing, Thinking, Degrees

  "Cameron Crowe for “Elizabethtown”". Interview with Paul Fischer, www.darkhorizons.com. September 27, 2005.

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• Well, if you ask any filmmaker how they got into it, everyone came a different route. Ive never actually watched another director work.

  Alan Parker

  Directors, Different, Wells

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• My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.

  Jay Roach

  Track, Guy, Criticism

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else's movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either.

  Joel Siegel

  Origin Of Life, Years, Ideas

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• As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel.

  David Cronenberg

  Inspirational, Motivational, Philosophical

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• I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Skills, Wish, Looks

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• What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff.

  Ted Demme

  Thinking, Looks, Pieces

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers, great actors, great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that, because I'm 24, I don't have a family, I don't need to make tons of money, and I'm not dying to get famous.

  Tobey Maguire

  Dying, Needs, Actors

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