Atom Egoyan Quotes

Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.

It's sort of one ongoing process where writing ends and directing starts.

Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.

I have stories that I'd like to maybe one day consider directing, but you need a lot of time to write and put it together.

I suppose directing on set is the most fun because it's a good crack and you feel you're on the battlefield whereas writing is a fairly solitary undertaking.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

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

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

I love writing. I think writing and directing go hand in hand.

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

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

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense. If you're a writer who is also going to direct, you're doing all your preparation: You're already visualizing everything, you're imagining how the lines are going to be read, you see the blocking in your head, and you know the rhythm and the pacing.

I love working with actors. I love visual things. I always intended to be a writer who directs and a director who writes.

Shooting a movie can be so tedious. You're trying to get 20 different angles on the same swing. You never get into a rhythm. But I took it very seriously.

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

For me, directing is like writing with meat. I can write live, in real time, and change things and be confident that I'm helping the movie.

You have to have the essential pleasure of making a movie. It's such a huge factor and adventure for a director because you really are the leader and the captain.

Directing is such a crucial part of the writing process; you start directing and you see what does not work. "Oh, God, what was I thinking?" and then you can rearrange it.

[Martin Scorsese ] basically works just like any other director. You work the scene, you try to find what's best in it and make it work. That's what it was like.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I had a philosophy, which may have been proven right, that directing isn't as hard as everyone says it is.

Every actor wants to direct.