Film Directors From The United States

"It’s all about revealing a deeper truth and not just showing events as they would normally happen."

"When casting, I look for actors who not only can bring the characters to life, but also add a sense of realism to their performance — I want the raw emotion to feel authentic. Think of it as if we are watching real people react to the world around them."

"Art has the power to heal and inspire, and I want my films to ultimately lead to positive outcomes and a greater sense of understanding. This matters to me because through most of my life, I’ve faced many obstacles and challenges, and filmmaking is my way of connecting with others and showing them they aren’t alone. As I continue to learn and expand upon my craft, my goal is to fulfill this mission in every project and inspire other emerging filmmakers to do the same."

"We try to encourage students to run with whatever they're passionate about. Sometimes it's a more personal film, sometimes it's a personal narrative. With Max, it's a topic that he felt was really important to him and he’s seen in other media and really wanted to explore in this format."

"Despite everything that's happening, art is still here, It's still alive, but in a way that accommodates what we're facing."

"It’s your imagination that becomes your superpower. Use it to come up with new ways and ideas to create work that could resonate with others."

"I hope to take what I see and introduce it to a wider audience, hearing songs that relate to a story with true messages and themes and even learn about the past so no one makes the same mistake again."

"It [filmmaking] makes me feel like I'm able to bring stories to life, so it feels like you're there, It gives perspectives they've never seen before."

"[Puberty is] a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally."

"I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big."

"As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too."

"When you’re 16, there are qualities you wish you didn’t have, and then when you’re 30 you’re like, ‘Thank god I have that otherwise I’d be living less vividly’. You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings."

"“The process of making it was just joy,” said Gerwig. “I don’t know if it was the pink or the music but it was just infectious.” Yet the most gratifying aspect, she said, was seeing strangers watch the film and realising that “the song that’s in my heart is in other people’s hearts”."

"The kind of amazing thing is that Barbie went to the moon before women had the ability to get credit cards."

"When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it...Nobody in the world cares if it doesn’t exist. You have to either believe in this fiction hard enough for it to become real, or you don’t, and it won’t."

"I have a lot of admiration for the director [Godfrey Reggio] because he knew how to give not just pretty pictures or images but was able, through a play of images, to give a critique of the modem world that is very close to my own. But it's rather amusing to consider how differently different people can interpret this film. My wife, for example interpreted it as the story of the development of the world and its progression -- as a presentation of the creation of the world moving along into, very probably, an apocalypse. But one of my friends had a completely opposite reaction to the film. He thought that in the beginning it presented chaos, then moved after that into showing the progressive development of order. So you can see that the interpretation of images is very difficult."

"The technology we have, is probably the most violent act against the planet that we can conceive of, more than the wars on the battlefield. The price we pay for technological happiness is bringing the planet to our knees. It's not something we use, it's as ubiquitous as the air we breathe."

"What is patriotism other than mysticism? The sadness and the danger, of course, is that we have become totally dependent on mass society for life itself. It’s not as if we have much choice. What can we do? These concepts are unutterable. They’re now beyond the pale of language. This is partly why I have used Hopi, a non-literate language, to name my films."

"The normality of the world we live in is completely insane. Okay? Now, what are you going to do? All of you have to make a living, so you have to get a job. I would say you don't have to do that. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to get a job. You don't have to earn that money. You can do something else -- if you wish. If you're willing not to have security. If you're willing to work with other people. If you're willing to take that beautiful Zen statement: leap and your net will appear."

"When Koyaanisqatsi came out in 1982 (it was begun in 1975), this film taught me to look at the root of the future. Bob Dylan's song "Blowing in the Wind" comes to mind. Our future is blowing in the wind. You can see it in the tense I've created for my films, "the future present", or the rooted future. What we saw in Koyaanisqatsi almost 300 years ago, is even more coming true now because of the rooted future we live in. If you want to change things, I suggest you say no to the rooted future and create a future for yourself. We have a choice to change what's happening."

"I call the films I make experiental. If this doesn't sound too weird, I look at the films I've been involved in as my children. When they're born, then they take on a life of their own. To try and remake your child is not a very good idea. What advice would I give to you? Whatever you're interested in, whatever you can do, do it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. (That's a paraphrase of a Goethe quote)"

"As much as he’s done for freedom of speech or whatever, he really doesn’t like what I’m doing."

"Redford is a very good collaborator, a kind of alter ego for me: he was that young prince who was blond in appearance, but who had a much darker interior. It was clearly a metaphor for America. And most of the stories we've done together have become love movies, romantic movies. In my opinion, he was the ideal prototype of this kind of event. We never got tired of working together. We've always been somewhat demanding of each other, trying to get the most out of each of us. And we didn't waste time knowing what would work or not. It was a great advantage: we knew each other perfectly. (p. 199)"

"I've never had a mad desire to become director, nor have I had to lay siege to a producer to fulfill that desire. Simply, I have become a director. Better yet, I was a director, and I didn't know what it meant or what I had to do. For a long time I was a director without realizing that it was the realization of a childhood dream. (p. 194)"

"Best Picture (C.E.1986)"

"I have some radical theories about the difference between acting on stage and acting in front of the camera. [...] In a play the focal point – and the goal at all times – is to deprive the actor of dependence on his director, because the director is useless once the curtain rises. In the cinema it's the other way around. At the really important moment, it is the director who finds himself alone, with his reels, at the time of the final cut. [...] I don't think we can talk about a real performance of actors during filming. There are only repetitions, it's mechanical, fragmentary, because you can always redo it over and over again. (p. 195)"

"I think he hates me a little, because after all, this year, the year of his professional "boom", there has been more talk about him by virtue of our flirtation than for his performances as an actor! (Barbra Streisand)"

"Making a film, in America, is a combination of actors and directors doing belly dancing in front of the producers. (p. 199)"

"Redford is a very good collaborator, a kind of alter ego for me: he was that young prince who was blond in appearance, but who had a much darker interior. It was clearly a metaphor for America. And most of the stories we've done together have become love movies, romantic movies. In my opinion, he was the ideal prototype of this kind of event. We never got tired of working together. We've always been somewhat demanding of each other, trying to get the most out of each of us, and we didn't waste time knowing what would work or not. It was a great advantage: we knew each other perfectly. (Sydney Pollack)"

"Best Director (C.E.1986)"

"There was a time during a period of national crisis when politicians from both sides of the aisle put partisan politics aside to uncover the truth. There was a time when Democrats and Republicans united to navigate a peaceful ending to a corrupt and criminal presidency. There was a time when members of Congress placed defending our democracy above party interests for the greater good."

"I've always appreciated diversity. I believe that American culture is founded on diversity and for this reason it is still alive and inspiring. I grew up in what you might call an unfortunate part of Los Angeles, where there wasn't much to do but experience the differences, go to different places, and hear different stories."

"The Gulf disaster is worse than a terrible oil leak. It’s the product of a failed energy policy that looked at profits before people and environment."

"Sound and accurate journalism defends our democracy. It's one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to contain the power-hungry. I've always said that All the President's Men is a violent movie. No shots are fired, but words are used as if they were weapons."

""[D]iversity, equity, and inclusion" represents a new mode of institutional governance. Diversity is the new system of racial standing, equity is the new method of power transfer, inclusion is the new method of enforcement. All of this could be presented to institutional leadership in a language that appears to be soft, benign, tolerant, and open-minded — something that, combined with the threat of accusation, elite administrators were culturally incapable of resisting."

"The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this also a trap: resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully."

"As Cuauhtin tells it, white Christians committed 'theocide' against indigenous spirituality. Those deities must be resurrected and restored to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods."

"The revolution, which seeks to connect ideology to bureaucratic power and to manipulate behavior through the guise of expertise, is ultimately not democratic."

"Learn how to 'challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs' and critique 'white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.' Teachers are then encouraged to drive their pupils to participate in 'social movements that struggle for social justice' and 'build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.' R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited in the state's official reference guide, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a 'Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe."

"He understands intuitively that appeals to a new system of governance based on 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' are a pretense for establishing a political order that is hostile to his values, even if he does not yet possess the vocabulary to pierce through the shell of euphemism and describe its essence."

"Academics want to be free to push their ideology at all times, but they also want to be free of democratic oversight. I hope to reverse that. I hope that the opposite becomes true over time."

"I have a bit more of a subtle take on the question of indoctrination: A lot of conservatives say 'Universities are indoctrinating kids to be blue-haired gender communists.' That's kind of a meme that you see everywhere, and I could understand why at first glance you might think that, but I don't think that's exactly how it works. I don't think that most professors are consciously in a cult-like manner indoctrinating their students, pushing their ideology, converting them to the cause in that kind of recruiting sense. I actually think it's something more subtle and more insidious. I think that it's just that they're not exposing students to any alternative sets of ideas."

"The popular slogan that "facts don’t care about your feelings" betrays similar problems. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is the slave of the passions."

"In pursuit of this goal, the state curriculum encouraged teachers to lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the 'In Lak Ech Affirmation,' which appealed directly to the Aztec gods. Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become 'warriors' for 'social justice.' As the chant came to a climax, students performed a supplication for 'liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,' after which they asked the gods for the power of 'critical consciousness.'"

"The only solution, he believed, was the Great Refusal: the complete disintegration of the existing society, beginning with a revolt in the universities and the ghettos, then dissolving 'the system’s hypocritical morality and ‘values’' through the relentless application of his 'critical theory of society,' a philosophy described by Marcuse scholar Douglas Kellner as 'Western Marxism,' 'neo-Marxism,' or 'critical Marxism.'"

"[Mamoulian] "[T]he majority of the films in the future will be done in color. Perhaps not immediately. Perhaps it will take three years or five years. But there must be progress and development in the cinema. Color will enrich it. It is part of that progress."

"To accompany the transformations I wanted a completely unrealistic sound. First I tried rhythmic beats, like a heartbeat. We tried every sort of drum, but they all sounded like drums. Then I recorded my own heart beating, and it was perfect, marvellous. Then we recorded a gong, took off the actual impact noise, and reversed the reverberations. Finally we painted on the sound track; and I think that was the first time anyone had used synthetic sound like that, working from light to sound."

"As soon as you use an element on the screen it becomes subject to dramatic laws. This is as true of colour as of everything else. So I wanted to shoot everything from the start. I took four or five weeks to prepare my plans. My idea was to build up the colour dramatically. I wanted to start with black, white, grey; then ooze into colour. And I wanted the dramatic climax of the film to coincide with the colour climax, which would be predominantly red, because that is the nature of red."

"Garbo asked me: "What do I play in this scene?" Remember she is standing there for 150 feet of film – 90 feet of them in close-up. I said: "Have you heard of tabula rasa? I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience. I'd like it if you could avoid even blinking your eyes, so that you're nothing but a beautiful mask." So in fact there is nothing on her face: but everyone who has seen the film will tell you what she is thinking and feeling. And always it's something different. Each one writes his own ending to the film; and it's interesting that this is the scene everyone remembers most clearly."

"There was a blue lamp on the table. Mr Mamoulian placed an orange against it for contrast. He shoved a green chair in front of a red curtain. He made caustic remarks about the visitor's tie, pointed out that it wouldn't look well against a yellow drape. He spoke of mosaics and color progression; of red for excitement, dark blue for dignity and rosemary for remembrance. "If blood was green it wouldn't be exciting," he said."