Milos Forman Quotes

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.

I think you should make movies as long as the story dictates.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.

For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

My intention is to do more films.

I attempt to create a form of seriocomic entertainment to either delight, enlighten, or disgust, whichever you'd like. In terms of making motion pictures, I write and direct and act. I guess you'd say I'm a filmmaker.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

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.

Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

Movies are not an art form where you get to kind of sit in your art gallery and paint, you know? You don't do that. You're spending a lot of somebody else's money.

Once you turn on the camera, making a movie is making a movie. I don't care if it's $9 million dollars or $50 million dollars. You have bigger toys, bigger set, actors who are better paid, but once you turn on the camera, it's director and performance, and I don't find a big difference.

Personally, as a filmmaker, I think you should prepare your audience as to what they can expect.

Our vision is to break the projects into stories that must be told, stories that we would like to tell and stories that people go to movies for. If we can find great scripts that fit these three categories, we will go out and make a movie.

Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a café somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.

The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.