Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by M. Night Shyamalan - Page 2

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.

I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.

You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.

The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.

I consider myself an independent filmmaker.

One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don't have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.

I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.

The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.

Saw #? Birdman . Such singular, audacious filmmaking. Can't stop thinking about the ending.

I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died.

I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.

I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.

People who come to see my movies, you're coming to see a drama masquerading as a genre piece.

Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.

I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.

I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them anyway!

I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.

I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

The whole world makes comic book movies now.

I want to make a bunch of small movies. I'm really interested in that for me in the future.

My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.

Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].

This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].

As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.

Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.