Film Directors From The United States

"I myself regard the deaf people as superheroes, protectors of the visual language."

"You can see the existence of these beautiful signed languages which are incredibly visual, and they require space, they require space to grow."

"Italian language is not just sonore. It is also visual."

"I got the idea [for Earthlings] because I was filming some public service announcements. It was mostly domestic animals, dogs and cats, and when they were killed on the street or euthanized in the shelters, they were put into this room that resembles a large refrigerator. But when I saw them piled up in there, it suddenly made me think of meat in a refrigerator. Even though they looked nothing like meat, there was this parallel – dead animals kept in a fridge – and that made me think of cows and chickens and pigs and eggs and milk, and so on. That was the beginning of Earthlings really, the first spark of inspiration."

"I had a lot of growing pains adjusting to the comic book writing format. The whole writing process just didn’t make sense to me. I had to somehow construct each panel just by describing it? But how many panels to a page? How much dialogue should be in each panel? How much time should pass between each panel? All these sorts of things were mind-boggling to me. By the end of writing the script, I sort of figured out some of my mistakes."

"I think whenever you write something you want people to like it. The best way to do that, usually, is to write what you think is good. That’s basically what everyone tries to do… just to write what they think is good. Part of that is staying true to the characters and the world (which makes it a kids show by it’s design)... and part of that is introducing deeper concepts that we, as writers, are curious about exploring (which makes it more interesting for adults)."

"As a director, you must keep your sense of humor, your patience and, most of all, your ability to funnel the collective energies of a large group of creative people. For that, you must stay well-hydrated, well-fed, and well-rested. It's also crucial that you have a top-notch ensemble."

"I think it’s important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that’s a problem. You’ve got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you’re going to make full use of it. There are some people who shouldn’t watch horror films, and I’m all right with that. It’s not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil. We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it."

"If you’re doing it right, you’re not asking the audience to buy into your point of view at all. If you’re doing it right, you’re asking the audience to accept the character’s point of view as the character’s point of view. That can be anything. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies from characters’ points of view that are not our own. That’s part of the gift movies give us."

"Book-to-screen adaptations must always strive for two things: First, you must find a way to tell the broad story of the original plot; second, you must somehow reflect the spirit and texture of the novel—that is, you must transform a lot of words into a few pictures. All those digressions, inner monologues, thought processes, turns of phrase, all those word pictures, and especially all that un-photographable stuff that made the novel so delicious, must somehow be represented onscreen by use of the filmmaker's tools: moving pictures, dialogue and performance, sets, costumes, music and all the other tricks of the trade. That's the process a writer must go through to create a successful blueprint for a film."

"I prefer character-driven stuff. I am an actor and I come from theater and I love creating a scene and working with actors as opposed as opposed to working with CGI. But there is some fun to be had with the B-movie monster movies as well especially today because they are so self-aware, you can have a lot of fun. But I definitely prefer the more straightforward horror."

"I'm not sure what this means and if it can be replicated, but we did something very unique and none of it was planned. There wasn't a $20 million marketing budget designed to make this; it just happened. The audience took the movie for its own and decided to make it an event, and that's pretty awesome. And by the way, there were people who liked the movie so much they were defending the film against people who were thrashing it. Completely mind-blowing. I've never had that happen, either."

"We do these movies in six months so there’s going to be some stuff that misses the bar in terms of looking super polished. We take what we’re doing seriously as if we’re doing one of those things. Also, we just go, “Look, we’re just going to be outlandish and crazy because that’s what these movies are.” They’re intended to be fun. However anybody wants to construe them is up to them. If they want to think that they’re bad and campy, that’s fine. What I’ve found in general though is the true fans that love these movies, they love them because they are what they are."

"The interesting part about making these films is that it’s half directing, and half really being a leader, because you have such little time to shoot such a big concept. It’s really like a war against time, and your crew is your platoon. You’re going as hard and as fast as you can to try to get everything on screen."

"I wanted to be an actor or be a director since I was a very small child. I mean, my mother went into labor at a movie theater. There were, like, four movie theaters around us when I was growing up in Austin. Movies became my babysitter. I think I saw more films than I saw reality. Then I noticed something when I was in my late teens that really made my thinking shift in what I wanted to do with film. When I was watching a film as a young man, there would be a second or two when I drifted outside of myself. I noticed how for a moment, in the image and music and train of information, I was traveling through the film, leaving myself. And I knew that was something I wanted to do. I wanted to see how long I could make that feeling go on—if I could take someone outside themselves, outside their body for a minute, five minutes, maybe even 80 minutes, 90 minutes."

"To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible."

"I don't like the new trends in horror. All this torture stuff seems really mean-spirited. People have forgotten how to laugh, and I don't see anybody who's using it as allegory. The guy I love right now is Guillermo del Toro. I'd love to make a film like Pan's Labyrinth."

"I make sure that they photograph everything they do. And they have to have a portfolio to graduate. You know, there’s no formula for success out there, but what works is: learn how [to photograph], photograph everything you do and you put those photographs in front of people that can help hire you. That works."

"Love stories—yeah, there’s something about them. I cry when somebody does something good for somebody, not something horrible. I avoid all the horrible stuff. But to me, when a human being is sincerely generous, or kind or overly helpful to another human being, that’s when I tear up. I just love the idea of love."

"I love CGI when it’s done well. It may sound strange coming from me, because if you watch my stuff in movies it’s happening right in front of you, but I wish we had CGI back then to solve some problems. Getting rid of an edge or enhancing stuff, which is what they have today. I love it when it’s done well."

"Tom Savini Explains The Enduring Appeal of Zombies, In Film and On TV (March 14, 2014)"

"[About why he named his daughter True and son Ocean] I want those names to be their destiny, for my daughter to be honest and my son to be expansive. I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing. … being called Forest helped me find my identity."

"Life is full of choices, and many years ago, I chose to become a vegetarian, and it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made."

"So from there on I made all their science fiction films, and the more I did of these films the more I liked it because the studio left me alone. No one at that time was an expert at making sf films so I claimed to be one. I wasn't, of course, but the studio didn't know that so they never argued with me, no matter what I did. In most of my sf films I tried to create an atmosphere because I think if you shoot an imaginative film--a film in which you ask an audience to believe things that are bizarre--you have to make them believe it. You can't do this with the story or actors alone, you have to create a kind of atmosphere while shooting it in which the audience's credibility will be suspended to the point where they don't say to themselves: "That's impossible!""

"I get fan mail almost every day, and lots of calls from people who say, "We’re having a party. Could you bring your rubber suit over and jump in the pool and scare everybody?.""

"I'll put it this way, it's like when you play football and you put on all the gear — the shoes and the pads and the helmet. At first, it's bulky and cumbersome. But then, when you go in the game and you start to play, you don't even know you have it on. Swimming in the suit was like that. Once you get into it, you forget about the suit."

"There were two times in my life that inspired me the most. The first was when I was a kid, probably the most emotionally influential time, when you’re naïve and innocent. I went to movie theaters and fell in love with genre films in the 1950s, when there was a big wave of monster movies. My passion came from the young guy who was watching The Fly back in 1958. Then, going to USC I began to watch movies in a different way and was exposed to different kinds of movies, foreign films. We had directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford come down and lecture us. It was unbelievable!"

"I staggered through my career and came out the other end, alive. I made some films that meant something to me. In my opinion, they weren’t all great, and they weren’t all successful, but they sure were ‘me’. And this is what I was going through or thinking or feeling as a director at the time, and I’m very proud of them. A lot of great directors just never had the chance to have their work appreciated and celebrated and watched, all these years after they were made. So, man, what do you want out of life? It’s great!"

"When I think of John Carpenter, I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted. How can we? Why should we? He is lightning in a bottle"

"You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare."

"What's great is that he's written this, so there's never any confusion between what the writer wants and what the director wants. He always rewriting and tweaking and I like that. I like somebody who's passionate about their project and what they're doing. And he shows up and he knows exactly what he wants and he's incredibly clear. He mustn't be given caffeine. He's got more energy that anybody I've ever seen. It's extraordinary when you think how much of a weight this production must be for a director. I'd be terrified. He's endlessly brilliant and fun and comes up with really good notes. It's been really great."

"The first Elm Street was such a fresh idea and it absolutely blew me away. But the second one didn’t have Wes involved and I think it suffered as a result of that. With the third one Wes and his writing partner Bruce Wagner already had a script before I came onboard. Then me and Frank Darabont did some re-writes. We thought ‘why can’t we make this film wilder and much more fun that the first one’. I realised that the heart of it was these adolescent kids. These 15/16 year old kids who are just at that age when you start to realise that bad things happen in the world. Of course, none of the adults believe the kids about Freddy so going to them always makes things worse in these films."

"Stephen Sommers certainly knew what he was doing. Indiana Jones is a hardened cynical guy with a heart of mush and Stephen created an Indiana Jones-lite, one who was a jocular guy willing to take a pie to the face, handle a gun, work in a fist fight, and handle all the requirements of an action hero. Brendan has the unique ability to take a pie to the face, let himself be in a situation where he feels overwhelmed, and then survive. This was definitely in the wheel house of Indiana Jones and always has been. It was quite conscious on Stephen’s part and now I’ve done something different with it."

"The thing that I loved so much about the monsters is that the assumption is that they're broken and that fixing them no longer makes them a monster so they have to stay that way. And if you want to write something sort of complicated that's about kind of the nature of us all having a monster inside of us, I mean, I think that's why the monsters have endured. They're all weird reflections of aspects of our personalities. I can't really think of anything I'd rather be doing than that."

"I think, about a lot of these monsters is that there are these very central, basic, human emotions that you can talk about when you talk about these monsters. You can talk about Dracula’s longing for love, you can talk about the Mummy’s longing for love. So as messed up as they may be in terms of their behavior, and they are monsters, there always has to be a rooting and an understandable idea behind why they are who they are."

"But what it really is about is storytelling. Character, story, character, story and that kind of got me through, and then I just wrote my ass off. Everything I've directed, I've written. So whenever anybody asks me how to become a director, I say "For me, you've got to write." Nobody ever offered me anything the first five years, so I just wrote my own."

"We were shooting a Ku Klux Klan parade led by Bill [William Shatner], and he went through the black part of town in a parade of cars carrying crosses with the hoods, and then they burned the flaming cross. We shot late at night; I said, "Cut, print!" and everybody went, "Yeah, we're out of here!" Guys raced to their cars, the grips threw the last couple of things in the trucks and we just drove straight north."

"I don't know if I would say I'm an artist. [...] I would say that I'm a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that's wonderful. [...] It doesn't happen very often."

"My father was an engineer and I intended to follow in his footsteps, but movies became my real passion. Careful planning is important in engineering, so I used that experience to focus on film preproduction. With the low budgets I had, I couldn't afford to have the cast and crew waiting around for days on a 10-day picture while I figured out how and what to shoot."

"I come across as a very straightforward guy and that tends to surprise people [...] Clearly my subconscious mind must be some kind of boiling inferno."

"[Asked why he never made a film like the art house titles his company distributed: I]t's an economic situation. All of those films were made in Europe with government subsidies. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut did not have the necessity of having to earn their money back and so they were free to do what they liked. In the US it's different. It's a money-making industry, so that's what you have to do"

"It's not so much watching them but understanding how they were made – the preparation and willingness to deviate when necessary especially if you're on a low budget, I also took every film I made seriously and did my best on every one."

"Kong, I think represents a classic cinematic case of being misunderstood. And so, tapping into that is a very, very pure way of breaking down his character and then getting into him being this lonely protector, and the sad plight that he has is a totally different thing than we’ve seen before. Was it difficult? Sure, but it was necessary."

"You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

"I liked Merian Cooper well enough. He had this wonderful, boyish enthusiasm, and I was keen about his style and his friendship and what he stood for as a human being. I was ready to take whatever Merian Cooper wanted me to do. He was like a big boy who had enthusiasms."

"One of the first things I did when I came on, I said, “I do not want this Kong to be a quadruped. I want him to stand upright, I want a throwback to the 1933 film where he is a biped, because he is a monster. He’s not just a big silverback gorilla, he’s a movie monster.” So I wanted to stand him upright, I wanted to make him tall, and part of that is because I wanted him to feel like this fusion between a god, a man, and a beast. I wanted to make him big enough that, if any of us stood at this table and we looked up at this thing, towered over us, how big does that thing have to be for the first thing that your brain says is, “That’s a god. I’m looking at a god.”"

"I just heard what was said, it isn't strictly accurate by any means, I'm a man who's just been lucky on having wonderful partners, Schoedsack alot more than I did on Grass and Chang, and right down the line I've only had John Ford as a partner, Thomas is a great friend on technicolor, and for cinerama, Fred Waller invented it, Thomas picked up the ball and ran with it, and there's a young man in this audience, Bob Bendick, that most of you have never heard, that did far more of the production then I did. I want to thank all the great partners I've had in my life, thank you. I just want to add I'm still John Ford's partner."

"Mike Lindell: "'The Big Lie' is the big lie." Steve: [Laughter] Is that like a Zen koan? Like "the sound of one hand clapping in the forest"?!"

"If Andrew [Breitbart] were still around, I bet he'd tell Bannon to stay in Europe — and not just because his tendency to wear several shirts seems more consistent with European fashion. Bannon's understanding of conservatism is entirely European... Conservatism in America has always been deeply traditionalist, sometimes too much so. But at the core of the modern conservative movement has been the effort to protect, defend and conserve the traditions of a liberal revolution, grounded in the best arguments of the enlightenment (slavery notwithstanding). Bannon's potted blood and soil nationalism and racially tinged populism runs counter to that project and the best and highest ideals of conservatism and America itself. He turned Andrew's Breitbart.com into a "platform" (his word) for the alt-right seeking to inject European swill into the American body politic. Let him stay in Europe and hand out torches for the marchers. His un-American schtick has no place here. I'm sure Andrew would agree."

"The Hard Drive From Hell: you come for the porn, but you stay for the compromise."