Filmmaking Challenges Quotes

Every movie has its complexities and its challenges.

I think we spent 60-something million on 'Hateful Eight,' which is actually more than I wanted to spend, but we had weather problems. And I wanted to make it good.

It's the business of movies, it's the fights that go along with the level of budget, and more than anything, it's the creative constipation of having to live with one idea for two or three years. It's just not that fun.

Directors don't always create, they can also destroy with too many demands.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

I'm amazed that movies ever get finished at all - much less come out good once in a while. It's an awful lot of work and it can go wrong a thousand different ways.

I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don't want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.

I've never felt that my job was difficult because I'm a woman. It's a difficult job regardless, and it's even more difficult in Lebanon because there's no film industry. There's no structure, funding, or institutions for filmmakers.

My respect for Westerns have gone way, way up. It's hard and treacherous work. It's hard to find people these days who can ride horses like that and jump onto trains.

There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.

You carry that through and adapt it to a camera lens, but you're quite right, you cannot be sure of what an audience is going to do. You don't know what's going to happen to the piece you're doing anyway. You don't know how it's going to be edited. There are a lot more unknowns in cinema. But that you have to readily accept. That's when, I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.

For 'City of Ghosts,' I really didn't speak any Arabic. It obviously made it more difficult, but I also found it to be an advantage while shooting. It allowed me to focus on the emotion of the scene as opposed to just chasing dialogue.

You always have to appeal to your audience. You always have to consider how well your project will do in terms of admissions. I abandoned many stories because of that. But I don't get too down about it. It's something I accepted from the time I decided to work in films.

The experience of making a movie is far removed from watching the end result. It's exciting, but it still makes me squirm.

I'd never thought of horror as being so challenging, but it is.

It's always been a lie that it's difficult to make films.

There is no guaranteed formula. And that's one of the interesting things about filmmaking. You could put $115 million in, and it doesn't guarantee success.

There are no minor decisions in movie making. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down around my head many months later.

I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.

It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

Every time something bad happens, like we lose a day because of weather or an actor gets injured or anything else happens, the schedule has to change. It's the most challenging Tetris puzzle.

More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.