Top 53 Quotes & Sayings by Ryan Fleck

Well, going way back, when we were making short films, it was just the two of us. Literally, Anna had her little camcorder and I had the boom and we were making documentaries.

I'm a sucker for movies about uncommon friendships: 'Midnight Cowboy,' 'Harold and Maude,' 'Scarecrow,' 'The Last Detail,' 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' 'Jules and Jim,' 'Rushmore,' 'Stand by Me.'

We may have our own ideas in the writing and editing stages, but we work out those disagreements in a constructive way.

When you get that email that says: FX show, political-oriented, starring Cate Blanchett, you're more inclined to take a quick read than you might otherwise.

The casting process for 'Hate Mail' just got so difficult. Once you lock in one person and then you try to find the next person, you lose the first person and then the financing falls away.

If it's not a high-concept movie, if you're not having outer space people come down and blow stuff up, then there's a pool of 15 to 20 male actors and 10 to 15 female actors. And if you don't get one of them, you really need to reexamine your budget and the story you're trying to tell. It's frustrating.

That's a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world.

The comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick really uniquely tapped into Carol Danvers - not just her toughness and her power, but also her vulnerability.

I believe Ryan Reynolds is magic. He's a magical human being.

In the same way I wanted to learn how to play poker, I've always kind of been into the blues. It just seems like a cool thing, but I didn't know much about it. So I thought, 'Hey, let's really learn about the blues.'

So many great ideas come out of a misunderstanding.

I moved to New York City in 1997 as an undergraduate transfer student at NYU.

We had no interest in making a traditional sports movie.

Hopefully 'Mississippi Grind' will be good in the theater.

We always knew we wanted to make a fiction film.

It's very exciting to go from a short to the opening night film within a three year period.

We won't look at New Orleans, St. Louis or Memphis again without thinking about making 'Mississippi Grind.' We have a lot of memories.

I grew up a big baseball fan. I thought I knew a lot about the game, but I didn't realise that all these American Major League Baseball teams have their own private academies in the Dominican Republic to find good players and bring them over to make money for their teams.

We like to learn about cultures when we make movies.

When there's film rolling through the camera, there's a heightened awareness of the importance of that moment, from the actors and the crew. It creates a much more old-school respectful atmosphere for the process.

I think that filmmaking is very addicting and risky, and it gives you a high, for sure.

Anytime you actually finish a film, I think it's a success. And to have that film seen and liked by audiences is the ultimate.

If I hear Anna say something, and I completely misheard her say it, and she goes, 'That's not what I said, but that's a great idea.' Whose idea was it? It was nobody's idea. It came out of thin air, but it was a misunderstanding. That's really what's fun about having a partner to throw ideas off of. Sometimes you get those good accidents.

Nowadays when you're shooting HD people will walk in front of the camera, it can just be rolling all the time - nobody cares.

Well, when you're nitpicking every little detail... with digital, you're seeing what the finished product is, right there on set, and that's when you start to lose a lot of time. You lose time staring at that image trying to make it perfect.

Once, as a 12 year-old boy, you've had the experience of seeing your team win the World Series, there is nothing that will ever replace that, or taint that.

Through the mid-80s I watched my team struggle, but in 1988 the A's made it to the Series. I was at Game 5 that year and was forced to watch the Dodgers celebrate a World Series Championship on our home turf.

I just hope to continue making and finishing films. And then get them seen.

It may never happen, but I'd love to make a movie and not be rushed or concerned about shooting too much film. Probably a fantasy, but it would be nice. It would also be cool to fill a movie with all my favorite songs, but music is so damn expensive. We can't all be Cameron Crowe.

Film has a magical process to it. The dailies, and the thing you see on your little film monitor, that's not the same thing that's going to be projected.

You have to follow the logic of your characters while you're writing.

For us, the biggest thing is casting and making sure that every role has the right fit and that person understands the role, and then, really, it's pretty easy. You just try to stay out of the way and say 'action' and 'cut' - don't say 'cut' too soon. Let it happen.

A movie like 'Sugar' you couldn't make today. The climate for making movies with no movie stars, half of it in Spanish, at the budget level that we had is gone. These are high-risk elements.

Growing up where I did, I came from a politically progressive family so I was aware of social issues, but it seemed like a very separate thing from film.

I mean, at the end of the day we're still telling stories and so we're just trying to stay focused on characters that we love and we've loved characters in all of our movies.

That's the most important quality for any actor, for us: someone who can communicate what they're feeling without saying, 'This is how I feel... ' It's what's on their face.

We hate it when movies, right off the bat, tell you who this character is, where they're from, why they are the way they are. Even 'Vertigo,' one of the greatest movies ever made, starts off by explaining why Jimmy Stewart has this fear of heights.

I'm very excited by the notion of very different people trying to help each other out.

It's okay to be serious but try to have fun with whatever you're doing.

I think on our first two movies we weren't really writing for anybody else above us and that's not to say that movies aren't ours in the way we want them to be in terms of the scripts.

On 'Half Nelson,' I was credited as the director, we both co-wrote it and Anna was the producer. We didn't know too many directing teams working at the time except the Coen brothers and that seemed to be the model, and people always know that they're a team, whether the credit reflected that or not.

I grew up in Oakland and for a long time I was the only white kid in school. Then I moved to the suburbs when I was in junior high and it was mostly white.

When I was 6 years old I went to my first A's game at the Coliseum. It was the 1982 season and the A's went on to finish fifth in the American League West that year.

It was cool to meet Stan Lee.

The original outline for 'Mississippi Grind' was actually an attempt to go funny. But when we showed it to people we realized that maybe it wasn't as funny to other people as it was to us - we have a pretty specific sense of what's funny - and then we thought, O.K., we need to do this more like we would actually make one of our movies.

Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets. But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way.

We wanted to capture Danvers' humor and flaws. For us as storytellers, those are all aspects that we really appreciate in characters.

Any industry where there's a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there's going to be some exploitation on some level.

Everything is a mess around our house. We do all our work here, but we try to get out once a day.

I think anyone who wants to go up against Captain Marvel ought to be worried.

We learned that, when people are looking around, waiting for you to decide on what to do next, it's often best to just say, 'hey, let's go again' - people start setting up, then you have enough time to discuss, if it doesn't go well on take 2, what the strategy is for take 3.

I was born in Berkeley, California, in 1976, and grew up in and around Oakland and the Bay Area.

Do the Right Thing' was really the first movie I'd seen that not only entertained me - it made me laugh and I felt suspense - but it also really made me examine the world that I lived in.