Director Quotes

As the director of an opera, it is my responsibility to unify the style of the particular performance, but one can certainly approach the piece from different points of view. That's what makes it interesting and keeps it alive.

I'm an actor's director.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

Just being hired by a great director is complimentary.

The only stage direction Jackie ever gave him, George said was: 'If you want to stay in the picture, stay close to me.' The rest of the cast remembered a television director's adage.

My guess is that if they now choose to change of director for every other film, it's just because you can't really change the formula, you can merely try to film it your way.

I'm an actor's director. I love it when talented actors can bring characters to life.

Historically the director has been the key creative element in a film and we must maintain that. We must protect that, in spite of the fact that there is new technology that's continually trying to erode that.

A film is a director's vision... there is, however, much input an actor or actress can have.

Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.

My parents said, Oh, he's going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

I like working as a director most.

The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually a press agent, actor, director, producer, leading man; and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude, but true.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

My strangest auditioning experience was when I was reading for a TV show, and right when I started the audition, the casting director left the room and yelled at me from the hallway to keep reading.

The thing that separates a so-so director and a great director is a love and caring for film.

Marlon was more of a formal zoo director type.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.

I was too dumb to know Opie was going to grow up to be a great Director, if so, boy, I would certainly have become his best friend.

I don't like people who use the press to advance themselves in a way that they haven't earned as an actor, performer or director.

When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'

Well, I wasn't just kind of standing in a queue at McDonald's and someone sat down and said, 'You're the director of a $100 million Hollywood movie.' I've been working in commercials for ten years.

'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director - who were just fun.

I think that for the actors, the last thing that they want is a director that's not watching, a director that goes 'Okay, it sounded good to me,' and they were doing something else or preoccupied with something else because they were worried about the light changing.

I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.

I want to take roles that challenge me and I want to like the script and obviously feel connected with the director because the director to me is so important.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.

The director calmed me down and told me I was being too hard on myself. He went on to say that I wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but needed to tone things down a bit.

It's a morality film, and it poses the question "What would you do?" I took it very seriously, just as the director did in terms of atmosphere and lighting, and I was just trying to help that vision along.