Top 1152 Filmmaker Quotes & Sayings

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.

I think we're used to the black filmmaker coming in and making the all-black subject matter. Especially at Sundance, they're looking for that. It's funny because amongst my filmmaker friends talk about this.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.

By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.

I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.

I don't consider myself a sociologist, I consider myself a filmmaker, among other things. Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker.

Francis Lawrence is an astonishing filmmaker, an incredibly gifted visual filmmaker. I have great respect for his work.

As a filmmaker I have changed, yes. I seem to have crossed a line and that journey, trajectory change is more apparent. I'd say, what changed dramatically in me as a filmmaker is the fact that now, it is about why am I making the film, what is this supposed to mean to people. Earlier, it was more about entertaining or engaging them.

I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.

It has a lot to do with just sort of trust in the relationship that builds between the filmmaker and the subject. There are some people who will never be relaxed in front of a camera, and in some ways that's my failing as a filmmaker to not put them at ease. It's also a function of time, and if you have that type of time.

The digital revolution has had a democratizing effect. Now anyone can be a filmmaker, but to be a good filmmaker is as hard as it ever was.

If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.

If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.

I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

Success stems from the producer creating the optimal conditions for the filmmaker's own creative process. Not from steering the filmmaker through a one-size-fits-all approach.

I really took filmmaking very seriously... It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I'm a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies.

I love making films. I'm happiest when I'm doing it. For me, the fear is not being able to make the next thing and not being able, as a woman filmmaker and as a filmmaker of color, to put together the resources to make another thing.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a politician.

As a filmmaker, I want to be known as a pan-African filmmaker and this is because I think that we have more to gain as Africans than as individual countries.

Well I don't think of myself as like a horror or science fiction filmmaker. I just think of myself as a filmmaker.

I'm a filmmaker, not a scientist.

Whatever storytelling muscles you've developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.

The worst thing that could happen to a filmmaker is growing up wanting to be a filmmaker.

I was an audience member before I'm a filmmaker. All I've tried to do as a filmmaker was to make movies I want to see.

Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.

For me, whether or not a film has some kind of massive budget or is an independent film, or however it's getting made, it's always about the filmmaker and, hopefully, being a vessel for the filmmaker's vision. That's what really attracts me to projects.

Real power is having the ability and the resources to tell an amazing story or to say 'yes' to a filmmaker and change not only the filmmaker's life but the world.

You have to be able to feel like you can play way outside of the box. If you're with a great filmmaker and someone you can trust, that's encouraged, and Seth was that kind of filmmaker and co-star.

I'm a commercial filmmaker.

I think Frank Capra was a much craftier filmmaker, a wonderful filmmaker. He had enormous technique, and he knew how to manipulate the public quite brilliantly.

But if you, as an independent filmmaker or a "serious" filmmaker, think you put more love into your characters than the Russo Brothers do Captain America, or Joss Whedon does the Hulk, or I do a talking raccoon, you are simply mistaken.

I think every filmmaker wants... I don't know about every filmmaker. I certainly want my films to just exist. I want them to be judged for what they are and analyzed, accepted, criticized, whatever you want to call it, on their own terms, not as part of some mall-cop genre.

What I have learned first and foremost is to follow your instincts. As a filmmaker, there are no rules as to how to play this game. That is a big problem I think that exists in the education on how to be a filmmaker or how to make movies.

If you think you are a filmmaker... make a film, and then show it. You need to be able to finish what you started so it is presentable. When you screen it and see if your film has an effect on an audience, you will understand what it means to be a filmmaker.

The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea and I can pretty much execute it. As old as I am now and as long as I've been doing it, I can pretty much get it done in a week. While a filmmaker has a great idea that should be out tomorrow, but he has to go through this process of getting financing, then selling it, then casting. I've always been in awe of filmmakers and their patience in realizing their vision because I could never do that.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.

I don't want to be the Asian filmmaker; I just want to be a filmmaker. I want to be Spielberg. I want to be Tim Burton.

Every filmmaker's different, every filmmaker has a different approach.

I'm a filmmaker to my bones.

The very first idea I ever had about making a film... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd because at that age that's a stupidly ridiculous idea 'cause how will I ever be a filmmaker.

With filmmaking, I for so long was like, oh, I need permission to go out and be a director and be a filmmaker. And I read Robert Rodriguez's 'Rebel Without a Crew.' He just went out and did it, man. In his book, he even says just put your name on a business card and say you're a filmmaker. Congratulations, you're a filmmaker.

I don't know of a more noble, a bigger deal as a filmmaker than to be a YouTube filmmaker.

I'm not the kind of filmmaker who's going to go from one thing to the next. I often wish I was that filmmaker, but I'm just not.

But I did on projects that I produced, that I directed, that I acted in because it was important. I want to be a filmmaker. I don't want to be an actor who directs, I want to be a director. I want to be a filmmaker. So that's a big difference.

I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.

I try not to think of myself as a woman filmmaker. I don't look for women influences. I have noticed in the past few years that there is a certain ceiling that a woman filmmaker can reach. I don't believe that it's sexism per se, but there are certain expectations in the industry about what films should be, how they should be made, what stories they should tell, and it's a habit, it's a tradition.

I knew I needed to make a studio film - not for any financial reason, but because, as a filmmaker, and especially as a female filmmaker, you have to break through the glass ceiling.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

You would assume that a filmmaker should know how to edit, but pretty much every filmmaker I've worked with doesn't know how to edit.

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.

Well, there's two things I have criteria for doing a film: The script, which is the story, and the filmmaker, and it's a filmmaker's medium. I like really strong directors, and so when I do a film, I'm out there to serve the director, really, which is in turn to serve the script, to serve the director cause he's the one making the film. I relied on Todd Haynes for that.

We've been fighting our whole lives to say we're just human beings like everyone else. When we start separating ourselves in our work, that doesn't help the cause. I've heard it for years: 'How do you feel being a black filmmaker?' I'm not a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker. I'm a black man, I have black children. But I'm just a filmmaker.

I learned that you have to say that you're a filmmaker. You're not a screenwriter; you're not a director for hire. You've got to take charge. You're a filmmaker, and you're going to make a film.

Alejandro Amenábar is a very interesting filmmaker. I had really liked The Others, which was a movie he made with Nicole Kidman a few years ago. He made a very compelling case about how much he wanted me to be in this movie. Whenever a really passionate, talented filmmaker seems to have an interest in me, I take it very seriously because I like to work.

When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!

There's the instability of my attitude as an artist, the instability of our perception of the world, and the idea that with this mix, you never know exactly what's the point of view of the filmmaker. This breaks the stability of the belief that a filmmaker is somebody who has a logical relationship with his own material. These elements create this atmosphere that I find more interesting than a normal atmosphere, based only on the characters.