A Quote by Natalie Portman

I've stood up to producers before, and even a director. I saw them being abusive. A lot of people on the set are scared to say stuff when they're not being treated right.
Being scared is really a good thing. It's being scared of being scared that's bad. Being scared of walking through your fear, going to a place of true creativity - that's what an artist is, that's what he does. If you do that, then being inspired by your contemporaries or people from the past is really great.
People think being Elvira is a lot of fun - and it is - but I was doing a lot more bizarre stuff before then, just being a dancer and a showgirl and traveling around Italy in a band and working for Playboy Club, and later being a model and meeting a million and one people and being kind of a groupie... It's all been really interesting.
It's just that the nature of being a director is being incredibly overwhelmed with getting the shots right, dealing with the locations, and then there's a two-year-old in the scene, and all that stuff - you know, there's a lot of kids in scenes.
You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
When I move from being a cameraman to being a director I looked at a lot of other cameramen who tried to make the move. And in each case they moved up their camera operator to be the DP, which really meant they didn't want to give up being the DP, and really wanted to do both. And my feeling was if I was going to succeed as a director, I had to just be a director and give up the safety net of being a cameraman.
I learned a lot from Clint [Eastwood], who's an extremely economic director. I learned a lot from Michael Winterbottom, who really gave a lot of trust in the actors and allowed them to live in the space instead of trying to manipulate and make it too set and too staged. Working with [Robert] De Niro taught me a lot of being an actors' director and what that is. I've learned a lot from pretty much everybody. Hopefully I've picked up something from everybody I've worked with.
A lot of people will say different stuff like, 'You can't do it.' They'll say no before I even say anything. You just have to believe in yourself, and there's a reason they might say no, because they probably haven't seen it before.
Way back in the beginning, I would say in the 20s, when titles were first being treated for films, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. Everybody was inventing. There were no conventions. Everything was up for grabs.
I always feel so proud of the things that I was most scared to do, and they usually end up being the right decision. It becomes magic. It's scary, but I always say, when you're scared to do something, you should probably do it.
Being brave doesn't mean you aren't scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.
Men are even afraid to say, 'You look nice,' or, 'You look pretty,' when you come out of hair and makeup to walk on set. And before, men would constantly - producers would constantly say things, but that's kind of a way that they would butter the actresses up and make them feel secure.
When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before.
Greedo taught me a lot. I don't say that about every artist. Some artists might teach me stuff musically, but Greedo taught me stuff about being a man and being a musician and being a creative, and being different from other people.
In Hong Kong, in our generation that started out in the 1970s, being a director wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have director's chairs. We weren't particularly well paid. The social standing of a film director wasn't that high. It was a sort of a plebeian job, a second or third grade one. And the studio heads are always practical, there's never any fawning because someone is a director. There's very little snobbery about one's position as a director. The only ones people treated differently were those that were also stars; or the directors who also owned their companies.
I think being on a set where people aren't being treated as equals, and with just a common level of decency and respect, is really uncomfortable.
I think being on a set where people arent being treated as equals, and with just a common level of decency and respect, is really uncomfortable.
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