Jaime Hernandez Quotes

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.

For me, the movie's always evolving as I'm doing it. I throw things in as we shoot, and I take things out as we go. I want to create a whole life and then select the pieces that best sort of describe it later, you know? So there's a lot of wastage when I make a film.

I don't believe in closed scripts; I think that they should be open.

I like to leave things open, and even when I write out the story ahead of time, it always changes. I don't think I would finish anything if I was sticking to a plan that was very rigid.

The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.

But I just think we've got such a continuity with what we're doing that most people come in and fill in the blanks. And sometimes we leave a lot of blanks to be filled.

We go in and I do my thing, and then we supplement it with whatever we want.

I film quite a bit of footage, then edit. Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always 'let it keep rolling.'

I don't have a real plan when I do an interview. I have some themes that I want to hit. But I don't have a set list of questions that I knock off.

With 'Silver Linings,' I didn't feel - I was thinking of certain things, but I just said, 'Let me go with it.' You have to know what you're doing, where you're going with the scenes, and I put a lot of work into that. But when you're out there, at the same time you gotta be ready for anything.

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.

I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

No dance has ever turned out the way I thought it would, because I trust enough that I can start something with some ideas and then it takes itself somewhere.

What I learned in 'Sons' is that I would come in with a blueprint of a season and how it would go, and I realized that the looser my grip was, the better it became because the story found itself. Things happened as I wanted them to in terms of the bigger mile markers, but the fun part was I never knew how we would get there.

Shooting should not be about delivering something I've prepared; it should be a live process of finding things out. When things happen that you haven't planned, that's when the film comes alive.

You've gotta leave enough space for your actors to bring stuff to the table and whatever the weather's doing that day or what the light's like. Things can shift, and you have to be malleable. Every day is a different feeling and a change.

Every scene is on the table to collaborate on, to pick apart, to try a million different ways. Usually, what ends up occurring in the end is something that no single person knew would happen or had planned for.

Somebody who doesn't understand my directing style could be pretty taken aback by it if I start going off the schedule and focusing on something because I'm inspired in the moment.

I sort of go with the flow of what's happening on the set.

I think all my films have a different journey. Therefore, I take it as it comes.

It's tough to know what I'm going to write about. I never really know until it starts happening.

I don't really outline. I just kind of know where I'm going in my head, so I'll write and discover it for myself. Or I'll just write an entire episode and throw it out because I land on an idea and realize that's where I should jump off from.

Something that comics afford me is being able to change my mind at the last minute.

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out — I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.