Gary Ross Quotes

Eventually, everyone said, Why don't you direct? It would save time. And that's how it started.

A director must be patient and unflappable. I think I was always pretty relaxed. I don't find shooting as traumatic as some directors do. Some hate it. But you also have to be strong-willed and persistent enough to get what you want.

I have a notebook, and I know what decisions will be made in pre-production. Everything is pre-determined in the pre-production period. I visually design the whole thing, and I know when things will happen.

But it was not possible to do this movie, in this matter of time, without a solid rehearsal period.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

I'm thinking about directing, but I know it's a lot of work and I appreciate what directors do and I would like to be good at it. The opportunity has presented itself four to five times, and I usually said no because of the script.

There is an isolated experience to being a director. It's very communal because there's a crew, but it's only you. You're the one on the hook.

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

I believe in Danny Boyle. I really do. I know that he's not going to pull the trigger on something if it's not right.

I would say it's not as hard as writing, because when you're a writer, you walk right into the pit all by yourself, but when you're a director, there are at least 80 people who scream, 'Don't do that!' when you make a mistake.

I've told my agent to push the idea of me as a director for hire off the table. Otherwise, we're wasting people's time.

I'm happy directing films. On television, the direction takes your entire life away.

Well directing TV is very time-consuming, so if you are going to direct TV, a season will take a year out of your life.

Directing takes a lot longer than acting. This was about seven years in development, and then two and a half years with pre-production, production, post and now the release. Not that I have people banging on my door to star in movies, but it takes me out of the acting game for a longer chunk of time.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

The director makes the movie. The director has to have the story in their head, has to know the style of the piece, has to answer questions from actors, design, set, lighting, every department throughout the pre-production, production, and post-production, because they've got it in their mind. They've got to know exactly what they want and what the style and story of the movie is. It's them. They make it.

As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule.

If you're producing a movie you're involved in every aspect of the movie and that can be daunting and then going and doing a movie where you're just an actor for hire, and you can kind of sit back and giggle where you can see somebody sitting over there wasting time and wasting money.

I actually didn't want to have control of the writing on my first album. To write, you have to have time to connect with yourself. I don't have that time right now, because I'm so busy.

Directing is a huge amount of work with very little payoff, and a quarter of the money, and nine times more time spent.

I started working on how I would direct this a year before we started shooting "All We Had" and I was prepping, acting, and directing sort of at the same time. I knew that I didn't want to hold people up on set.

When you make a movie with Alejandro Amenábar, he very quickly... it was very clear you're kind of operating in his dream universe.

I'm always in awe of directors because they're just holding so much stuff in the air. They've got so many decisions that they need to be making and they have to have the complete overall look of what the piece of artwork is.

I've worked in the movie business for many, many years, where you have lots of days and lots of money. It's really mainly about time. We always try to conceive all of our action from a place of, "What can we shoot that looks fantastic?," rather than trying to do the kinds of thing that you would be able to accomplish in a movie.

To make what you have in your head, I think that's what directing is.