Denis Villeneuve Quotes

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

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.

I believe that the best cameraman is one who recognizes the source, the story, as the basis of his work.

I have considered the directing, actually. Not so much the writing. That is not really interesting, but the directing is really interesting to me.

We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.

I knew that I'd end up directing because I'm so hands-on with my films.

I try to learn from both, from features and documentaries. In both cases you have to find a way to make the camera as discreet as possible, and flexible enough to be able to capture the moment when it happens. I know from documentary how to not have a preconceived idea of what the scene could be.

Being a filmmaker is kind of like being a glorified spy.

When you shoot a movie, the camera is always taking, taking, taking and not giving anything back.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

I came from a background of directing behind-the-scenes documentaries.

When I made my first film, I didn't think of it as directing, so it wasn't like I set out to become a director.

I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS... a little documentary.

I've storyboarded for things other people have shot. So thinking in shots and orchestrating shots is not foreign to me at all.

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

To catch a piece of life on camera and make it come alive, add layers to it and deliver a product that is wholesome is really exciting to me.

When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.

There are no great scripts - just great films.

You want to enjoy making a movie - it's a wonderful, collaborative thing.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies.

I want to venture into film more, and I think that a nice way to transition into doing that would be a documentary. I think it would be interesting to find one person that really fascinated me or maybe a band and travel with them, but I don't think I could do it like I used to do it.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

I like making movies.