I've seen what a difference a good director can make to an actor's performance.
You can have an amazing director and terrible script, and the film's not going to be great. But if you have the most incredible script and an okay director, you could still get a really good film.
There's a paraphrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all.
There are so many great John Hughes movies covering so many different genres. You can pull so much from him.
It's entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don't say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them.
I don't choose my projects based on genre, I choose them based on the role and whether or not I've tackled that yet, based on the director and such.
Tone is so important because you can have a great script just be ruined with the wrong director - if they shtick it up or something. With 'Little Miss Sunshine,' I was so concerned they weren't going to play the pageant official realistically because you don't have to wink to play those kinds of characters.
Most actors are insecure enough already without having a director who adds to that.
Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.
A film's success or failure is strictly on the director's shoulders.
I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.
If you look at the least effective of the 'Twilight' movies, it was when they brought in an action-movie director instead of a director who was really a good storyteller. And you can tell the difference.
It's hard to imagine anyone interested in film not being a fan of Alfred Hitchcock because he's such a key influence on the entire history of cinema - it's hard to escape his shadow.
If you have a script that's not great, if you have a great director, you can make a great movie, but if you have a great script with a director who's not good, never are you going to have a good movie.
