Finishing a Project Quotes

I don't know if you've ever knit a sweater, but by the end of it, you're like, 'Ugh I can't wear this. I can't stand the color. I'm so tired of it.'

You can just start shooting things and see how it goes. But time is still money, so you have to know when you are finished. It's not like painting a picture which you could go on refining for 20 years - with a film you have to stop at some point, and that is no bad thing.

My part as an actor ends on the last working day. I think the success or failure only really matters to the producer or whoever it matters to. For me, when I finish the film, I'm done, and if I'm happy, that's that.

I always have a decompression period at the end of a film. Sometimes it joyful, because you're just happy to be done. Or it can be melancholy.

My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, 'That's a wrap,' after the last shot, fall over dead, and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me.

I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.

Oh, there's no such thing as my favorite performance. I can't sit here today and look back, and say, Top Hat was better than Easter Parade or any of the others. I just don't look back, period. When I finish with a project, I say 'all right, that's that. What's next?'

Sometimes I take the watch, or I take the shoes, but usually the souvenir is to take the life you had with those directors, or the crew - the camera person, the lighting person. When you finish a film it's like a little death. You had a family for a bit, and you finish the movie and you probably will never see each other again.

There's always that relief you feel when you're working on your own series that you can actually make it to your planned ending and that your audience will still be there to support you - and that your publisher will still exist.

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.

I come from a world where you get the film done, that's a success.