Angelina Jolie Quotes

I couldn't do an acting job just to be working. It really had to have some soul to it.

I came to the industry with wide eyes and an open heart thinking I was going to make a few films that really meant something that I could pour myself into.

When I'm making a movie, it's making use of my creative juices, and it fills me up with what really is - I think my purpose here is to tell stories. When I'm not, then I really have to learn how to live life and make use of the time properly. I'm not always great at making those decisions, but when it comes to working, my time is totally taken up. I have no option except to get up early in the morning and to work on that movie and to finish. But I take that with a pinch of salt, because I also love my time off.

I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.

I don't have this feeling like, 'Oh, I want to live in the United States and make movies and become famous just because the money is here.' I like to make movies that tell stories that I care about.

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

I'm a real person that cares about his art and cares about what he's doing. I have a heart and a soul and I want to touch people and give.

You have to make films you feel strongly about. And then hope you can find the audience.

I like to think I put some of myself in every character.

What I'm passionate about is telling stories which mean something to me.

Because I'm not doing it for the money, I'm doing it because I feel like that story needs to be told or clarified, or something needs to be shown about that.

In terms of directing a feature, I'd want the story to be right - you know, it's a year of your life, and you have to be focused on one thing, so I want it to be a story that I really, really care about and will enjoy making.

Part of doing good work is caring deeply about it, believing in what you're doing, and getting incredibly attached to the characters that you're playing, the stories you're telling, and the people you're working with.

I want to tell stories that I feel for, and I don't want to be a sell-out.

I only want to tell films that I really feel passionate about telling.

If you make a movie that's close to your heart, it will be close to other people's.

You don't just see and feel the movie, you see and feel every day you worked on it.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

If I didn't get joy from acting, I wouldn't do it. My passion for acting is growing and I love telling good stories and inspiring stories and helping to give a little happiness to the world and perhaps get the audience to think about different issues.

I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

I just try to be true to myself and write about things I'm passionate about. I think what most people don't like about movies is they can tell that most movies are a product, and they don't mean that much to the people who make them.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.

If I just know in my gut that a film is going to work, I'll fight to the death over it, and I convince myself. When a movie is purely a money job, the film doesn't have the same sort of intensity, and the audience almost senses it, at least that's the way I perceive it. So, yeah, the idea is to do something that you truly, truly believe in.

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery.