Keenen Ivory Wayans Quotes

When you put a movie together, you're continually screening it for yourself and you're screening it for other people. It's like a video game power meter. When the power bar starts going down, you've gotta look at what's going on.

They've got to deliver twenty-six episodes a season and they're not going to beat their heads up against a wall if they feel something didn't, like, pan out the way they had hoped.

If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.

At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

I love test screenings. Some directors don't, I know. But I love it. I think it's because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they're responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful.

I'm very focused on 'Dexter' right now. I want to make it as good of a show as we can.

I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.

As an actor, you know when you've got great material in front of you. When you're working, you think, 'Is this the one? The one that everyone will respond to and be moved by?' You pray that you have told the story well... that your peers will see it and audiences will love it.

I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

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 used to sit on the editing table to see where I may have gone wrong because after editing, only the good parts go on screen.

My way of deciding whether a film is worth doing is if you can get through it all in the first read.

When you cut a film, certain scenes fall away and don't fit into the shape of the movie.

First of all, the first cut of the movie was like three and a half hours and I walked away going, 'Wow, I know there's like twenty minutes that I can cut - ' when I first saw it 'But I don't know after that.' The first time I put up then in front of people I was like, 'Oh, my God, I can take that out and that out and that out.'

You need an audience to help you figure out what's working and what's worth putting on your album or your special - or even just what's worth touring with.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

Scripts are a house of cards and you can't just reach in the middle and pull out the middle card because the house of cards will fall down. But at a certain point you almost have to allow that house of cards to get knocked down a few times because you need to make it sturdier. How many times do you hear, "No, that doesn't make sense," or "Why would this happen?" That was a mistake. You shouldn't have those moments, because the moment you're knocked out of the story, then you're dead. And all you can go is moment to moment,or joke to joke. And that's gonna wear people out.

I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.

When you are scripting, the scene, the dialogues, everything comes before you, taking final shape. That is truly the most creative aspect of filmmaking and that is what I enjoy the most.

When you're in a good play and a good production, you find that you're in something that has a life beyond you. You think, 'Oh my goodness, this play's alive.'

I take time with my films and I want to work on every script properly before I move on to something else.

In a nutshell, directing 'The Gift' was all about understanding how the complex machine that is 'Game of Thrones' works.

Well directing TV is very time-consuming, so if you are going to direct TV, a season will take a year out of your life.

I'm a stickler for structure. So I tend to make sure I'm hitting certain points in the script and that I'm progressing and moving things along. You know, are the characters keeping the plot moving along? And are they true, and do I know their motivations?