Doug Liman Quotes

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

What's amazing about doing movies, compared to television, there's an ending you can see. There's an enthusiasm to it.

My god is narrative filmmaking.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

In the case of 'Jack Ryan,' it was a huge collaboration, and I enjoyed it very much, and most of all, I want the audience to enjoy it, too. I want them to feel immersed in this world.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

The audience is the camera. I don't want the audience to sit and watch, I want it to move.

Why movies are so powerful is because you are right in there and you stay in there until they want you to come out, and then you've really gone somewhere.

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.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

I hope to direct at some point, but I don't feel the pressure to rush it. I want to really know what it is that I'm doing.

I realized, because I've been doing these very small, character-driven movies, that this is entertainment. This is so much fun.

If you look at my movies, they're pretty densely packed, such that they not only hold up to a second viewing, they're oftentimes better the second time you watch them. So I've always thought about crafting stories that could hold up to multiple viewings, and so VR obviously fits right into that.

Films are a director's medium. We're all stemming from the director.

When people are telling stories on screen, you can show the reactions of people, play it off those reactions, and it can be fun. But when it's someone just giving an opinion on things, even if the opinion is kind of interesting, that is potentially deadly. It has to be really quick.

The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.

You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.

One fear setting on filmmakers is that the audience no longer has any patience. They want things to constantly move.

I have always believed that television is a very strong medium to convey stories, stronger than even movies. On television, you have more scope to explore a subject as it gives you more time.

I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.

What drew me into making movies is trying to make characters that step off the screen.

I don't know anything about directing, but if you love actors, know your story and hire a great company, then anyone can direct a film.

Pictures are written, acted, directed, photo­graphed, edited, scored and all that. The screenwriter determines what scenes are in and what scenes are out; decides whether that bit of information is dramatized or just referred to; whether it takes place on or off screen. There are millions of decisions made by the screenwriter.

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.