A director, I forget who, told me that it takes 30 years to make an actor. And I believe that. You have to learn your craft, learn your trade – and also you have to live a life and experience things.
The pastor of a parish will typically have no education in the chant or in music, and he will hire the first music director who walks through the door.
I never try to show an actor what to do or what to say. He has to find out for himself. The role of the director is to guide him to that state, and then to implement it.
There’s been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn’t have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can’t count the ways a director’s vision is compromised.
As an actor, I have always felt, everything is available in the script. If there is anything you feel the script lacks, you can have a discussion with the director and point out those.
I guess confidence is the only thing that I take from project to project, but I’m always open to learning everybody’s style – the director, the actor I’m working with.
I believe the director is the one that sets the mood and if you have this hysterical director it’s a domino effect. I would work for him forever, for nothing. Don’t tell my agent that.
The worst is when I talk myself into something. Sometimes you take things because you want to work with a certain actor, or you want to work with a director, even if the script or the part’s not that great.
I think I always try to be accommodating and open and available and proving for my director. I love to give as many takes as they want. I love to give them as many choices as they want.
Each director maintains a different personality. Either you get along, or you don’t.
My job, as an actor, is to give the director options. You can only hope that the takes that you thought were the best were chosen. But, then again, if I don’t watch it, I’ll never know.
As my other obligations are beginning to take an inordinate amount of time, I have asked to step down as WMG’s board chairman, effective January 31, 2012. However, I will remain a director of the company and in that way, continue my association with Warner Music and its extraordinary people.
Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.
Every director is so different from every other one.
One day, we were doing a serious scene and fast talking like we do and we could not stop laughing and the director had to stop the production. We had to go to our trailer and calm down and do it all again.
Due to God’s grace and a good director, I became successful.
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that’s kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.
I think every director has a different take, some are good, some are bad. The directors you get on best with sometimes don’t make the best films, so who’s to say who is right.
I was a child actor in ‘Deliverance,’ but not the banjo player. It was my dad’s big movie as a director, and at the very end there’s a scene where Jon Voight comes home to his wife. I played his young son.
The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.
But things such as ‘Harry Potter’, all I can do is shape my character, seek the director’s approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in ‘Harry Potter’, I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director’s vision.
We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.
George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency’s culture. He has failed. He should go.
What’s been nice is that I’ve been able to direct from a very idealistic place. I’ve never had to make my living as a director, which gave me a chance to choose material I feel passionate about. The directing allows me to not have to grab any acting role that comes along. I can pick and choose a little bit.
Indeed, the actor’s lot is a much harder one than that of the director’s, from one simple standpoint: The actor has to play the eight shows a week.
I think the most insulting thing you can do to a director is to challenge when he or she is satisfied with your interpretation.
You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that’s good.
I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director.
My biggest role as director on the film is keeping a sense of the overview – how to cast the movie and shoot it in such a way that it will cut together. And how to design the style and tone.
I’m never happy with the work I put in. No. I need to be told by my director and people around me that it is fine. Otherwise, I’ll even go, like, ‘One more take.’
I miss that process of getting the script and reading it and working on it. Every actor has their own way of memorizing their lines, and the whole process of starting to work with the other actors and the director, and doing rehearsals, and going to the location, and going through wardrobe.
Sometimes the producer has more say and the director takes what he is given. On other occasions, you don’t see the producer very much and the director is the one who it is all about.
A great opera house isn’t run by a director, but by a great administrator.
I don’t like people who use the press to advance themselves in a way that they haven’t earned as an actor, performer or director.
My musical director, Mark Cherry, is the most wonderful person who ever lived on God’s good green Earth. He’s my director, he does the arrangements. Really, he does everything – including certain janitorial chores!
There’s people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you’re compassionate.
Krishna Vamsi is a very good director.
I still can’t quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.
When I was a crusade director in British Columbia, all of our meetings were at 9:03. Somebody said ‘That’s ridiculous. Why did you do that?’ It’s because you remember it. You’ve never been to another 9:03 meeting.
Frank Capra, Hollywood’s Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers of Norman Rockwell. ‘It’s A Wonderful Life,’ the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch.
My dream is to become a director. I want to direct a Hindi film. I have two scripts ready. One of them is a fantasy-adventure, while the other is a thriller. I’ve assisted my brother Selvaraghavan, who’s a well-known director in Tamil cinema. I’ve also made short films.
A leadership culture is one where everyone thinks like an owner, a CEO or a managing director. It’s one where everyone is entrepreneurial and proactive.
Richard Marquand, on Jedi, was very much an actor’s director.
Every casting director I’ve met is a woman.
I hate to sound like Julie the cruise director but it’s people that I think about all the time.
The acting is something that will always be a part of my life, but the writing gives me a lot more creative freedom. You’re a pawn in somebody else’s chess game, whereas as a writer and as a director, you get to call the shots. And that’s very thrilling.
Matching character and actor is what a good director does.
A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.
A director just pushes them a little this way or that way.
After I finished my degree in Mass Communication in Manipal, I enrolled for a cinematography course in Pune Film Institute. That is when Nandini Reddy, the director of ‘Ala Modalaindi,’ convinced me to act.
Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director’s job to make it appear real… an audience should not be conscious of technique.
Of all the projects I’ve worked on, I’ve never worked with another director like Billy Friedkin. I think he’s a genius.
I’m trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.
A lot of the things that we’ve been able to do in the last several years were Democratic ideas, including the structure for this new director of national intelligence.
I never had a mentor. God, it would have been nice, but I just didn’t. I look up to Jane Campion. And my most favorite director Lynne Ramsay.
As a producer, the most important call you can get is on Saturday morning, when the Friday-night grosses come in. As a director, you want your film to be successful. But your outlook is a bit different. You become very conscious of the reviews.
