Steven Spielberg Quotes

When I sign on for a project, I'm there to give the director all the material he or she might need to tell their story, and that's the number one priority.

Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person.

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

It's one of the most beautiful things in the world, to go off and make a film. At the heart of it, making a film - it's pretend. It's a silly thing to do. But it can be important, and to have that experience with people you love is one of the best things you can do.

When the director has a vision for a piece that I've never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals, and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they're trying to create.

I'd like to produce. I'd like to come up with ideas and collaborate with people and directors and writers that I like, be a part of movies that have the same idea that the movies that impacted me have. I'd like to be able to do that for people.

Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.

Directors are our teachers, and I'm always craving to work with a great director. They're pretty much the first thing that interests me about a project. Let's put it this way: It'll take me a lot longer to read a script if there's no director attached.

I love the process of working with a filmmaker and the writers and the actors.

It's one of the things I love about my job: it's my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help.

The vision people have of a director is completely flawed - someone with a crystalline vision of everything they're going to do. How boring would that be? It's a creative and collaborative process.

My biggest inspiration is to work with interesting filmmakers and learn from them in any way that I can.

We tend to see films as artifacts of one mind. The reality of it is, I think, when you come out here and start working, you have to learn pretty quickly that it's a very collaborative process.

I wanted to be open. On the last project, "Affection," I co-wrote everything. Sometimes, I think, it's smart to step away and be open.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

I've done collaborations in all my movies, and I think it's part of what I enjoy about the process. This kind of intimacy that you create. Because it becomes very intimate.

Anybody who knows how to make a good movie, knows that it's a collaborative undertaking. To deny that its really dangerous.

With movies and TV, storytelling, it's a different medium. I really love it, but I'm one part of many, many pieces of that puzzle and a lot of it is out of my control.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.

Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.

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.

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

I didn't so much choose the film as director Claire Denis chose me.

When you agree to work with a filmmaker, it's important that you accept their world. It's an adventure. I like that. I throw myself into the director's arms, into their universe.