Director's Intent Quotes

If the director has clarity of thought and vision, you are bound to just go ahead and do what he wants to do. I respect that.

Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.

With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.

'Hellraiser' was what 'Hellraiser' was. It was a $900k movie, and there wasn't anything I would have done differently. But 'Nightbreed' was taken away from me. It was thought that its meaning wasn't... Its meaning didn't chime with the producers.

I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know... But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

Francois Truffaut's 'The Soft Skin' starts with a very mundane scene of a family and a man driving to the airport. Yet the music is like a thriller, and you don't understand why. It's not until later that you learn it's because the movie is a thriller.

I do feel there's certainly some films where you can feel that the directors don't care about the genre and they don't care about their characters.

Kubrick never explained the ending to us, or what his intentions were. He didn't intend for it to be a predictable film.

There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen.

That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.

I really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.

You need these experiences. Just know that sometimes, the director has a specific look in mind.

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.

I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn't make 'The Avengers' for me.

My analysis of the situation was that Roman Polanski wasn't trying to break us down or get a performance out of us by destroying us. He was absolutely, very simply, trying to recreate this clear picture in his head. And the pictures he creates are absolutely perfect, and they are exactly what he saw in his head.

In my experience, very few people walk out of a movie. You have them for two hours, and you're free to explain or not explain whatever you see fit.

As a means of supporting experiential element in film, once I begin to work on a particular movie I consider myself to be the tool of the director.

All I can say is that with 'The Golden Compass,' I didn't get to make the movie I had planned to make. When I look at the film, at the casting and certain scenes, I'm very happy. As for the final product, I can't vouch for that.

Maybe many directors are trying to create their own style of filmmaking, or to respond to audiences that come expect a certain style from them. But I don't care about that - I don't intend to have a 'Miike' style. I just pour myself into each film, enjoy it, and then what comes out just seems to have a 'Miike' style.

The film [Django] really has a lot of ups and downs, and taps into a lot of different emotions. To me, the trick was balancing all those emotions, so that I could get you where I wanted you to be by the very end. I wanted the audience cheering in triumph at the end.

I've made six zombie films; I've tried consciously to make each one different from the next.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else.

I'm just saying to everyone. The director does not direct the trailer. It's an edited version that takes so many moments of the movie, sometimes it's not even in the movie. The director does the movie. So don't judge the director based on the trailer. Please.