Management

"One would think that making a film is an ; you're building this—it's not, it's . The best metaphor I know of is we make in [] and it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's what the process is."

"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."

"First cuts are a bitch for a director, because it’s been so many months and you put your trust in your editor and you’re going to see your film assembled for the first time. You look at it and go, This is terrible. I hate it."

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. A comedy is life with the dull bits cut out and the wit and humour maximised."

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."

"In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life."

"I think it’s important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you’ve got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances."

"All I Need to Make a Comedy is a Park, a Policeman and a Pretty Girl."

"Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it."

"I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality! My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery". Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."

"If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is."

"I do not wish in any way to depart from the principle that a wrongdoing director, whether he be morally or legally wrong, should be made liable for the highest amount which could have been obtained from the property wrongly taken by him while it was in his hands."

"The office of director … a man ought not to fill without qualification."

"Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention - directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action."

"The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view... Consider … the class of industrial investments only... The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty’ (a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics)."

"Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal."

"The director is really a watch-dog, and the watch-dog has no right without the knowledge of his master to take a sop from a possible wolf."

"We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least."

"It has been my belief that political awareness can be raised as much by entertainment as by rhetoric. There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive – in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen. Obviously, a single piece of work can’t change the world, but what you try to do is add your voice to the chorus.”"

"A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”"

"I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them."

"There are three stages in making a film: there’s pre-production, where you’re planning everything, and you’re getting your sets, you’re getting your script right, you’re getting your cast right, and you’re getting the crew set. I have a lot of respect for the crews. Then it’s production, where you go in and you put it all on film. That could take anywhere from, in my earlier films, as little as eighteen or twenty days to six months with a Star Trek or The Sound of Music, one of those. . And then there’s post-production, where you’re there really for as much as three, four, five months on the editing, the re-recording, previews, and making changes after previews, and finally getting it ready to release."

"Huston's skill as a director was always that the emotions in his films, whether love, fear, hatred, determination, holiness, greed or desperation, seemed genuinely felt, and he extracted some extraordinarily deep performances from actors not previously noted for extreme mobility."

"[As the clones fight the droids]"

"And Later I Thought, I Can’t Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.” –"

"When you start out as a filmmaker, you do parodies, because you can’t really compete on a studio level. That's part of the reason I wanted to produce this film – Traveller."

"What you have really got to learn is focus on learning as much about life and about various aspects of it first Then learn the techniques of making a movie, because that stuff you can pick up pretty quickly. But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies."

"I'm stubborn and creative. Anybody who works in an artistic medium trying to create something does not like people looking over their shoulder going, 'No no no, make it blue! Make it green!' If you have a vision, you don't want a lot of outside influence. A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.' That's all there is to it. If you have to think about it, you can't direct something. There are directors out there who don't know how to make up their minds, but a true director has an idea in his head and can instantly weigh any decision against that and say, 'That's right, that's wrong.' You welcome feedback from talented people, not marketing people or executives who aren't creative"

"I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in."

"People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning."

"Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures."

"We are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship... Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. … How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?"

"Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages [[directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction."

"Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible. Back in the '70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, "We're brutalizing the audience. We're going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum." The respect for human life seems to be eroding."

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it"

"A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

"I think it’s a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests, it’s not the other way around, that’s how I feel."

"Berle and Means’ book remains the point of departure and the central reference for reflection about corporate governance. It has given rise to differing, even contradictory interpretations, which explains how it could be used in support of opposing theories, notably on the question of the relationship between shareholders and managers. Thus, it has been used to argue in favor of the shareholder conception that is now dominant, even though it contains, as we shall see, a conception of the corporation that is radically different to the contractualist view that underpins the current doctrine of shareholder primacy."

"Freeman is the acknowledged father of the stakeholder approach. His Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach (1984) introduced the concept of stakeholders, all of those individuals or groups other than shareholders (or owners) who have a stake in the particular decision or action of companies. The book proved to be a landmark in the development of stakeholder theory, a theory of management and business ethics that emphasises morality and ethicality in managing organisations. This theory was a departure from the dominant Anglo-Saxon approach that grants priority to shareholders and independence of management. Nowadays, the stakeholder approach is mentioned in virtually every publication on corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. By interacting with their stakeholders and societal context, organisations are able to establish their (social) responsibility system, enforced in part through laws and regulations but also increasingly voluntarily through company codes and business principles. The stakeholder theory is applied within various scientific disciplines ranging from business to law, from politics to health."

"Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society."

"We have to change the mindset of our corporate leaders and, obviously, we have to raise the level of corporate governance."

"Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots."

"While it is legitimacy that gives a board the authority to impose its will on management, it is credibility that makes a board effective and value creating."

"National politics have from the start aimed primarily at efficiency — that is, at the successful use of the force resident in the state to accomplish the purposes desired by the Sovereign authority."

"Don't misunderstand what we administrators mean when we use the shorthand of efficiency and economy. When we say efficiency we think of homes saved from disease, of boys and girls in school prepared for life, of ships and mines protected against disaster... We do not think in terms of gadgets and paper clips alone. And when we talk of economy, we fight waste of all human resources, still much too scanty to meet human needs."

"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity."

"Man is an agent... a center of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity... seeking... some concrete, objective, impersonal end. ...he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship."

"Scientific management is not any efficiency device, not a device of any kind for securing efficiency; nor is it may bunch or group of efficiency devices. It is not a new system of figuring costs; it is not a new scheme of paying men; it is not a piece work system; it is not a bonus system; it is not a premium system; it is no scheme for paying men; it is not holding a stop watch on a man and writing things down about him; it is not time study; it is not motion study, not an analysis of the movements of men; it is not the printing and loading & unloading of a ton or two of blanks on a set of men and saying "Here's your system; go and use it". It is not divided foremanship or functional foremanship; it is not any of the devices which the average man calls to mind when scientific management is spoken of."

"The criterion of efficiency dictates that choice of alternatives which produces the largest result for the given application of resources."

"If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future — and these markets clearly did not exist — what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?"