Filmmaking Approach Quotes

I've never had to pitch a movie to a studio. I usually just let people read the script, then I cast it. I always think pitching is for baseball.

There are two kinds of films: the ones that are devoid of logic but can still hijack the audience, and those that can win them over with logic. Both kinds can succeed, and I like to work in both.

I'm happy I'm doing films at a slow pace rather than doing anything and everything.

I don't usually direct actors in the classic sense of that word. Instead, I try to remind the characters before the shoot what's going on in a very simple way. I then watch them, their inventions as actors, approving or not approving what they're doing.

I feel like, with most filmmakers of my generation, I like the over-the-top stuff. I like to be wacky and really in your face.

Alejandro Amenábar has a unique way of approaching movies and thinking about something which was new to me. It was different. I have a lot of respect for him so I just took a gamble.

I'm not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.

When I am making a film, it's very instinctive, it's not preset.

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.

When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.

In my films that I've directed, and my work in commercials and videos, I've rarely used handheld. It's just not something I'm drawn to, but I've seen it done very well.

I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.

I don't have a directorial overview, which sometimes is very helpful.

The Hollywood model is to develop scripts for 10 years, sell them, transfer them, attach this actor, then attach a director. This isn't what I'm about. I'm much more of a creator and a doer.

Here's the thing that people don't understand: I don't really care. I've never been a careerist. It's not a strategy. I react to certain characters and story lines and specific mode of filmmaking.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

I always want to try to make films feel timeless, because one of my biggest pet peeves is that there's a movie you love, and then you revisit it twenty years later, you show your kid or something, and it's like, 'Oh my God!' with hairstyles and clothing and all that kind of stuff.

The director of 500 Days of Summer is doing the Spider-Man movie. That's not necessarily the movies I want to make, but it's all about the story, and if you connect to the story, and you feel you can tell that story better than anyone else, then great. Jon Favreau killed Iron Man, I loved it.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

I kind of feel like... I have a slower instinct than most live-action directors, but I have more patience.

I have a few filmmaker friends who are known for shooting super-fast, and they say that you don't have the time to over-think things and how that helps things out creatively.

Mark and jay Duplass really like to improvise. Even if we beg them to go back to the script, they invariably ask us to go "off the rails," as they like to call it. It's just the way they work. You get a full written script. And it's really, really, really good, so that's why it's kind of peculiar that they always want you to improvise, because if I wrote something that good, I would want everyone to stick to the dialogue that was written.

If you look at the end of the movie [Monsegnor Lahzar], I give a lot of space to what the spectator can also imagine of what's going to be Bachir's life afterwards. So, there's the restraint part, and there's the fact that the story is happening in the school which allowed me to tackle all these subjects without making it too didactic, because in the school everything happens.

I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways.

The "If you build it, they will come" approach to filmmaking has always been helpful to me.