Charlie Kaufman Quotes

I have so much respect for directors. It's a tremendous amount of pressure; you have to keep steadfast and keep what you know is right.

Directing is much more psychological-it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between two and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

A good director has to be a captain - he has to work with a lot of people every day.

Directing can be very lonely and quite intimidating.

It's a lot of stress being a manager - a lot of moving parts.

I pretty much know that directing means that you have to answer about a thousand questions every day and you have to answer them quick.

Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack.

There is a lot of management going on with directing. Maybe that was the biggest surprise-just the amount of tending that I had to do. The different personalities . . . It's not my way, and it's never been my function before as a writer. I tend to be a moody and somewhat withdrawn person, and I felt very clearly that I had to throw that away because that wasn't allowed here - there were other people who were going to be filling that role. Sometimes it became exhausting, especially around the eleventh hour of the day.

When I'm working as a director, I might have an idea of my own but I'm also trying to get great ideas out of my actors. Directing is much more psychological - it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between 2 and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

I'm very much a leader in a lot of the work that I do or that I've done in my career.

I don't think I know enough about acting to direct. You need to be a slight megalomaniac, not where you want to take over the world, but where you want to make every single decision and the buck stops with you. It's an awful lot of stress.

The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.

I think the grandfather of the set is the director. He needs to have authority, to do what people want. A warm grandfather; he needs to know his job, to be open.

When you're the director, you kinda do all the work.

I think management is about just that - managing people via man-to-man skills.

There's people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you're compassionate.

Definitely directing is the thing I like the most because this is where everything you know can be used. It's the most personal process ever. It's the most demanding one, but again, rewarding.

I think my best work is when I'm kind of in charge.

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

Coaches are an integral part of any manager's team, especially if they are good pinochle players.

Guidelines for bureaucrats: (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble.

Get a good team and do what you think is right.

I've been on a lot of sets, and I've been around a lot of directors, and I've been working for many years now, but stepping in the shoes of being the decision maker and the guy that everybody is relying on at some point, yeah, it was challenging for sure. One thing is that you're responsible for a large group of people.

I would say my strengths are vision and strategy.