Director Control Quotes

It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.

I can't stand directors who try to micro-manage everything. When it happens these days I just walk off set, saying if they don't like the way I'm doing it they can get someone else.

In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.

The first time I did a big American film, I was surprised by all the different financiers who came to the set and told the director what to do.

Sometimes I think being an actor is like being a dog for a director; it's like they throw a stick, and you want to fetch it and bring it back to them. You want a pat on the head for it.

My father's films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It's the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.

When you watch a Hitchcock movie, you feel like learning back because there's a master in control.

I think one of the things you have to be aware of as an actor is that if you come on the set and see the director standing there mouthing all the words while a scene is going on, that's usually a very bad sign because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head. He knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and you're not going to dissuade him.

In the past I've worked with directors who saw very much their scene in their head and knew exactly how they were going to cut it.

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.

There's no such thing as a non-final cut director.

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.

Not many French producers work the American way. In France, the director decides everything, he has final cut. I'm trying to do things differently, without the Luc Besson solution.

We had a very energetic floor manager and he was always jumping around all over the place. The director would send down messages like, Can you tell that actor to calm down?

The thing is David is also aware of everything and it's not like you're going somewhere the director is not.

In the studio the director controls the actor's every move, every inflection, every expression.

My crew [on "Fitzcarraldo" filming] actually said, "We have filmed it from outside on the rocks of the shore. We should be on board [the ship]," and I said it's dangerous, I only do it if you cinematographer Thomas Mauch and you actor [Klaus] Kinski decide on your own.

Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.

In Hitchcock's movies you can see the storyboards and that's cool. It's nice to see a filmmaker be that prepared. Most filmmakers today have their heads up their ass, they're not nearly that prepared. He obviously had a right to say this is what I want and this is how we're doing it, because he was ready. Some filmmakers show up on the set and they don't know what they're doing. So then everyone has ideas and that makes a bad situation too. Be a director who's completely in control and yet no one knows it.

Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there's a lot of eye-rolling... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in.