Cinematic Process Quotes

If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

I ended up falling in love with the whole movie-making experience.

I have to say from an actor's perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you're doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.

I am much more involved in the filmmaking experience on Mag Seven. I'm much more involved in story elements, casting decisions, the writing of the show, the blocking of the scenes.

I noticed while working on Green Lantern that the actor - albeit forefront in the film, obviously, and the key focus for the audience - is kind of the smallest cog in the machine when you're shooting.

You can't print everything and that's not good for filmmaking, because you wanna have as many options as possible and print as much as you can, but if you're going to shoot a film - an independent movie on film, the only way to really do it is to print your selects.

Making Superman was so hard. We were a year over schedule. We were there a year and a half, the first time. And in a year and a half, you go through everything you go through in a life. So you can't really go, "Oh, it must have been fun to work with Chris Reeve." In a year and a half, you bonded like a family, so you know someone far too well to think something as simplistic as "Oh, it's just fun." You know their secrets. I mean, it was everything. It was truly - it's a cliché to say we were family, but we really were.

By the time we got to MGM, and Lions Gate the movie was done there was nothing else to say. It was done. Just as at Universal, it was art by committee.

Very rarely have I worked with a director where we've been at odds. And by the time you've actually talked to somebody and you have the job, there's something that they see in you that they want you to bring to the character. And the best director says very little to you, acting-wise. They usually just say, "Okay, here's the shot." It's their job to do all that stuff, and your job's to do the acting. So it's very rare that somebody will say, "Oh, no. I conceived this very differently".

Nobody can ever describe how much you explore a character on a Peter Berg movie until you're doing it.

There are a lot of things going into making a movie. So many things can go wrong. So many people that need to show up and bring their "A" game. If one thing is out of place, the whole movie can fall apart.

Most of the great directors I've worked with - De Palma, Spike Lee - like rehearsals.

The mystery of film is not in the script. It's in the shooting, in the interacting of humans and space and time.

I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving.

There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.

We shot the movie [Waitress] in 20 days so there wasn't a lot of time to learn. There wasn't a lot of pie baking going on, at least not by me. But we always had pies while we were filming - we ate two different pies every day for lunch!

I've lived through the shooting of movie, the editing and every other process along the way, so it's not for me to really judge it. I'll probably look at it again five years from now to get a fresh feel for it.

If films could run because of performances, everybody's films would do well. It is the director who makes the film.

In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.

Sometimes I take the watch, or I take the shoes, but usually the souvenir is to take the life you had with those directors, or the crew - the camera person, the lighting person. When you finish a film it's like a little death. You had a family for a bit, and you finish the movie and you probably will never see each other again.

You know, directors are funny people. They live with these movies for a year or more. And when you go in to score the picture, you're fooling with their child. They want to know everything that happens to the score - and why.

Film is a machine: you never stop.

The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen.