Michelle Yeoh Quotes

I have always believed that when a film is being made, it has to be the director's vision.

I had a philosophy, which may have been proven right, that directing isn't as hard as everyone says it is.

Every actor wants to direct.

Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.

To me, the director is the most important, rather than the story.

With Kubrick and most film directors, they are in complete control, but one can influence them.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.

In Europe, the director is the king: it's his vision. It's an auteur tradition.

As an actor, you can go in, and you give your best performance, but if you hand that performance to ten different directors and ten different editors, you get ten different movies.

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.

Let film-makers take a call about what films they want to do.

As an actor, we can only do what the director wants. Only the director has a vision of the entire film.

The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative

I wrote a script and I've been whispering in director's ears for a really long time and I'd love to direct.

Not to knock the people who've given me the opportunity; I appreciate all the opportunities I've gotten, but one of the things I think I really learned from the features I got to direct is that your job as a director is everything about the movie. It's to pick a story that's really worth making, and make sure that the basic components are there. You're not just a part of the team. You're really in charge, and the responsibility falls on you if all the components aren't there for a worthwhile film.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

When I make a film - I direct my own film, I write my own script - that's what I want to hear from the audience. 'Oh, thank you, Jackie!'

All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.

My point was that it's hard to make good films, but I'm not under any illusion that you do all the time.

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

Nobody ever starts out to make a mediocre, commercial film. You always think it's going to be something. And then, once you're done with your shooting, you have no control. You're just done, as an actor.

I've found that the more experts you have on a movie, the less control the director has.

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.