Steven Spielberg Quotes

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I like directing. It takes a lot out of you, but I'd like to do it again - I just have to find a story I want to tell.

No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.

As much as my primary vocation is that of an actor, if anything, I feel like I am more excited about filmmaking in general, so it's not always a specific role that I'm attracted to, but rather an entire piece that I want to be a part of.

Directing is an act of interpretation.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.

I discovered that, in order to write a magnificent piece, you should shoot the images because once you are filming, you are writing the script in your mind.

If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen. If you don't have a brilliant screenplay, then you either have amazing actors who give you the chance to improve whatever is on the page, or an interesting director who has enough faith in the project that they can carry it through and get it somewhere.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

I want to do films I can relate to emotionally.

More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.

One of the things I've learned as a filmmaker is to have some aspect of the movie be something that I admire greatly, whether that's an actor I'm working with, the subject matter, or a book.

Really I'm a fan of any movie, whether it's suspense, action, or comedy - anything that has a good story.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I've done before and hopefully it becomes a good movie.

I love writing. I think writing and directing go hand in hand.