Karan Johar Quotes

When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

I like to control my films from beginning to end, to write them the way I want.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.

To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.

And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I've never questioned the choices I make as a director.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

I want to make movies that I want to see, and what I miss and I'm not seeing.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

Movies are too literal.

There are many aspects to directing that have a romantic place in people's minds.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

I think films are bigger than structure.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

I'd grab the camera and tell people what to do, and when I was 14, someone told me that it was called directing.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

I want to direct one day. I want to write my own thing and really be behind the scenes because you have more creative control.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.