Mike Nichols Quotes

The biggest edge I live on is directing. That's the most scary, dangerous thing you can do in your life.

When you make a film, it's a bet. You don't know how the film is going to be, anyway.

Directing, I get all kinds of inspiration. It's working with people. It's a lot more fun.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

I enjoy acting, and I appreciate people who have passion about what they're doing and have a vision about the film they're trying to make.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

Success and failure are a part of filmmaking.

When you make a movie, you don't know how it'll turn out. You can only guess.

I'd said no to directing 'Snowtown' a few times and was quite scared of it, but I saw a story there that was worth telling.

Filmmaking is a gamble.

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

Every film, obviously, everyone starts out aiming at making it good, and in the end, filmmaking is really fragile. Making a film is like building a house of cards on the deck of a speeding boat, or playing chess on train tracks. Every opportunity feels like that; it's the one artistic field that's unlike most of the others.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Part of filmmaking is always a guessing game, and part of it is always a game of trust.

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

Auditioning for something you already know and love is terrifying.

I always loved experimenting in film.

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Every single time I start to do a picture, without fail, I feel as if I don't know what I'm doing.

I like messing around, and I like working with artists who I respect.

I go into meetings with some film-makers and they literally have nothing to say, they're almost bored by their own material. I'd rather work with people who are very passionate and very animated about what they want to do. People who just want to tell stories.