I was fortunate to work with some of the talented filmmakers of our industry. In addition, one film leads to another. As a newcomer, I explored those opportunities.
I think filmmakers, in general… There are some awesome, really great filmmakers – but on the whole, filmmakers, actors, I think they are the biggest bunch of whiny, over-paid babies on the planet.
It’s great that we have commercial filmmakers who make family films and understand the aesthetics well, taking this route. They know how to bring the emotions out there without being vulgar. After all, it’s a natural instinct.
There are definitely a lot of roles I didn’t get based off of the way I look, but I’m not going to let that stop me. I’m going to write stories for myself or work with filmmakers who want to tell stories about real people.
You still get the movies made. A filmmaker can always scrape up money to do a movie. The passion drives it. And you’ll get the money. Money’s the easiest thing. But the hardest thing is finding a way for people to see your movie.
As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I’m trapped in a genre that I love, but I’m trapped in it!
Being tied down to a pre-med or engineering track would have slotted me into a very narrow group. Being a young filmmaker allowed me to explore many areas of life and many kinds of people.
I don’t see myself as a crusading feminist filmmaker. Not at all. I have the luxury of coming from New Zealand and I’ve had moments in my life where being female is considered to be a tremendous advantage – emotionally, career-wise.
What matters to me as a creative artist is the credibility of the production house, the honesty in the script, and the way the filmmaker has conceived the characters in the narrative.
I would like to hook up with one of the great Japanese filmmakers, like the master that made ‘Ringu,’ and I would like to take ‘The Wicker Man’ to Japan, except this time he’s a ghost.
I didn’t start out thinking that I could ever make films. I started out being a film lover, loving films, and wanting to have a job that put me close to them and close to filmmakers and close to film sets.
If you look at anybody who’s had along career, if you look at the choices they’ve made – even if the movies haven’t worked – they’ve always worked with great filmmakers.
In Mexico, there are good filmmakers, but they didn’t always have the opportunity to show their work. But since ‘Amores Perros,’ many of these filmmakers had the opportunity to show their films, and they have a newfound energy for cinema.
There are many wonderful themes from ‘Moana’ that people discover, and I also hope they’re inspired to go on their own journeys and to learn more about the Polynesian culture, because we’re pretty great! I’m so proud of the people the filmmakers talked to – the Oceanic Trust.
Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.
As a filmmaker, I’m a collaborator first.
I think the only thing filmmakers can do is try to make good movies and make them as long as they allow us to keep making them. But at the end of the day, it is a business, and if audiences don’t care, there’s nothing we can do. It’ll just go away, I guess.
I’m really interested in having a studio one day and being a filmmaker.
The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea, and I can pretty much execute it.
The Taliban’s acts of cultural vandalism – the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas – had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.
If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.
As a filmmaker, I’ve sat on the other side, and I’ve watched when people I know have a film, and it’s doing really well, and people are talking about it in all the trades, and everybody is excited about it, and I’ve always thought, ‘Hmm, what would that be like?’
Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.
In this business, you’re dependent on the writer, the filmmaker, the luck of beating out who knows how many people for the part. I’m over getting torn up about that.
Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker, living in Flint, Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself.
I’ve always worked with a team of actors and filmmakers ever since I was a kid in Michigan making Super-8 movies.
If you’re a filmmaker who grew up wanting to make a movie for people to have that female experience of sitting in the theater together, it’s hard to do unless you can compete with the bigger spectacles that are being offered to them.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people – directors, filmmakers, and writers – over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He’s not only a great director, but he’s also a great writer.
The kind of filmmaker that I am, even my darker horror films generally are still very fun. And I think that’s important for me and the kind of films I make.
I’ve been very lucky to work with great filmmakers. But I think my days of just freely acting regularly, that being my sole creative fulfillment, are gone.
I think documentary filmmakers need as much protection as possible under journalist’s privilege. How else is the public to know what is going on?
Whatever storytelling muscles you’ve developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.
When I read the script and saw the jazz music setting, and when I read the name of the filmmaker was Damien Chazelle, I immediately got this mental image of Antoine Fuqua.
As a filmgoer and a filmmaker, I want to participate and tell stories of woman and man that will move us forward.
Blu-ray and the technologies emerging around it are the premiere format for reproducing what we do as filmmakers. There’s more space on the disc, more bit rate.
As a filmmaker, I really want to utilize the tools to carry the voice – my voice, and the voice of the characters.
I think filmmakers in general are, as the tools become more and more advanced, you’re able to tell stories in a way that I think is more realistic. The technology just wasn’t there up until pretty recently, and it takes a bit of time for the normal artistic way of approaching something to become a mainstream thing.
I’m not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that’s probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.
I really took filmmaking very seriously… It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I’m a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies.
Ah, there’s a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who’s, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he’s a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art.
I’ve always been a fiction filmmaker and I’ve been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.
I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn’t even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn’t going to a lot of comedy.
Personally I find there is just as much if not more creativity among game makers as there is among feature filmmakers.
I characterize myself a little bit as a reluctant filmmaker. I learned from watching my friend in college stay up late at night, at 2 A.M., just to get the lighting right, and I thought, ‘You know what, if that’s what it’s going to be like, I think I’m just going to write,’ and I did that.
Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me.
I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.
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.
We are here predominantly to support independent filmmakers and their needs. We are also here to assist people actually in their production, non-commercial people in their production.
It’s a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That’s sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn’t happen to me.
It’s up to the courage of the filmmakers to make art in cinema, not just business. John was rejected by studios, he borrowed money and did movies with his own money. You’re either courageous or not. You have to find a way.
