Doug Liman Quotes

Usually when I write a movie, I'm lucky if I get one good actress.

When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.

If you read a part that you want to play, and you already know you have actors you want to work with but it's not on the page, it's not going to be on the screen. So that is the most difficult thing to do for a producer, is to get a script that attracts this kind of talent.

Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

I wasn't trained as a writer-director. And the projects I write are difficult to finish.

What you do is get the right director and the right screenwriter and the right cast. It's a fantastic job.

If a script comes together, and you end up liking the people who are part of it, that's when you can make magic happen. It's a huge combination of trying to find something you think you can deliver on and a director you think you can collaborate with to make a good picture.

I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.

'Warm Bodies' was a more long-term thing; I had to write the script, who knew if it was every really going to happen, if I'd find the right actors, and so on, so I grabbed '50/50' because I just fell in love with it.

Producing small films, you usually have four or five people you want, and you hope one of them will say they'll do it.

As soon as you make some films that people like, you'll be sent material, and that can come from anywhere.

When you write and direct your own film, you basically know exactly what you want. Or you hope to. For the studio, it actually can make life a little easier, because if you have a bunch of questions, they only need to call one person.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

I wrote a screenplay for 'The Witches,' which Alfonso Cuaron was producing, but we couldn't get it made! The studio just wouldn't greenlight that movie. It's my favorite Roald Dahl book, 'The Witches,' because I grew up with my grandmother a lot of the time, and the relationship between the boy and the grandmother speaks volumes to me.

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.

Whenever I hear the narration for a new film, I have this process back home where my mother reads all my scripts.

'Bahubali' did not happen overnight. The producer Shobhu Yarlagadda, Prabhas, and I kept talking and discussing and imagining.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

For us, performance is everything. If we can get great actors in there who like us, and we really like, we feel pretty confident that we can make a movie work.

It's always the script first choosing roles. [Then] whoever else is attached. I never like to be the first person attached, because I don't really trust what's going on, unless there's a really good director.

I start casting early in the writing process, so I can tailor the script to the gifts of the actors.

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.

I had the luxury of working on the script with Andrew [Dominik] for a good year before the film started, so I was already intimate with the story [of The Assassination of Jesse James] and felt quite prepared walking into it.

Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature.

You set up the look, the visual effects and the sets, and that's awesome, but I enjoy the casting most of all. That's where you really get to define the show.