Harold Ramis Quotes

It's a great luxury for me to be able to write on the films that I direct, and kind of a nice thing to be able to write enough to get credit, which is difficult for a director.

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

The system is not really particularly amenable to filmmakers who write and direct their own work. It's much more about the studio already having a property that has a marketable concept and then hiring the director on board.

I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.

Movie making is really, it's a director's medium, it's not even so much an actor's medium.

Movies are a director's medium, and they end up getting less credit than actors. They get the flak if the movie doesn't do well, and the actor walks away with most of the credit if the film does well.

The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It's a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies.

I'm not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.

You know what I did? I turned down an offer to do 'Enemy of the People' with Steve McQueen. It doesn't matter that the film was never really released. A movie like that, successful or not, adds to your credits. It leads to other roles.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.

My dream as a teenager was to run a movie studio, as in the old studio system.

I directed some movies in the past, and I'd still love to do that. You know, the whole thing is a labor of love, I think.

Director of any film is very important, and an actor has to leave himself in his hands to mould.

Yeah, the whole 'One Tree Hill' experience made me realize I wanna write, and produce, and direct as well as act. I'm interested in all facets of the industry.

When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

I want to go to film college to learn about the departments and how everything works. Then I'm going to start directing.

I know some directors get very involved in trailers and posters. Some even cut their own. I stay completely away from it. I just see my job as making a film.

I love directing, and I will direct myself a few times.

What I will say - one thing that is attractive about getting a real film made within the studio system is that studio systems, with their marketing and distribution, have real power.

Directing a film in Hindi is definitely on the cards.

Content financing is a difficult beast no matter what era of Hollywood we're talking about.