Film Research Quotes

When I did 'The Cell' - no matter what you think of that movie, because I have my opinions of it too - it was, you know, I still have nightmares from the research that I did. Not from playing the part, just from the research.

A lot of times I'm on my own trying to find research material and things like that and trying to educate myself on the world and the film that I'm working on.

If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I'd be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It's part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.

I always collect a bunch of images for every film that I do, that reminds me of an essence of the character, or the time that they live in, or what they're experiencing.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

I actually didn't really start to get into the research of film until I was much older. I decided I wanted to direct a lot earlier than I started to do the research, which is really strange, but it is the case.

There are people who don't like to use other films as research, but I love it.

I watched every single Bond movie three or four times, taking in everything I could about how the character had been portrayed in the past, then threw all that away once I started doing the role.

I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.'

[We were very lucky that Sean [ Ellis ] researched the film [Anthropoid ] for many years.] We sort of piggybacked on his knowledge, and he gave us a lot of materials, which we read. For me, the greatest resource was actually shooting the film in Prague.

At one point, I got to work as an assistant for Martin Scorsese: He wanted to know about all the films coming out, so I would make clippings and put it all in a big scrapbook for him. I was also in charge of his video library - it was like a little video store, and his friends and colleagues would come and borrow films.

I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole.

The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.

What's so fun when you shoot in a car is you get to research all the other road movies that have ever been done, and you try to figure out where do they place the cameras and how many shots can you get with your people in the car. So just doing the research on the films is so fun.

My favorite part of the film business is the research part, with the access we get from people who are excited to be involved and the things we get to see and do, which we're not normally going to get in everyday life.

I often make films about subjects I don't really know much about. Maybe it's laziness, but I don't go in there having done a tonne of research; the research happens while I'm making the film.