73 of the Best Quotes About Filmmaking
“I would travel down to hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.”
- Werner Herzog
“When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films’.”
- Quentin Tarantino
“We don’t make movies to make more money. We make money to make more movies.”
- Walt Disney
“The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.”
- Peter Jackson
“Filmmaking can give you everything, but at the same time, it can take everything from you.”
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
“To be a filmmaker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.”
- Danny Boyle
“I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, i dream all day; I’m dreaming for a living.”
- Steven Spielberg
“If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a pretty clear idea of what was going on.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
- Orson Welles
“I love movies with spectacle, but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn’t have to be a creature.”
- J.J. Abrams
“Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.”
- Steven Spielberg
“Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.”
- Doug Liman
“Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable to others.”
- Orson Welles
“Film is a battleground.”
- Sam Fuller
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“If you compromise what you’re trying to do a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you’re suddenly really far away from where you’re trying to go.”
- Spike Jonze
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
- Orson Welles
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but somebody has to.”
- David Fincher
“As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.”
- J.J. Abrams
“All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that’s why it takes so long.”
- Steven Spielberg
“I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there’s got to be a captain.”
- Ridley Scott
“Self-plagiarism is style.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.”
- Martin Scorsese
“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
- Orson Welles
“Filmmaking is the ultimate team sport.”
- Michael Keaton
“People will say, ‘There are a million ways to shoot a scene’, but I don’t think so. I think there’re two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.”
- David Fincher
“I believe that filmmaking - as, probably, is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you’ve got. so, each time i make a movie, i give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way.”
- Francis Ford Coppola
“I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.”
- J.J. Abrams
“In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“I don’t try to guess what a million people will like. It’s hard enough to know what I like.”
- John Huston
“Everything about filmmaking tries to distract you from that first fine rapturous vision you have of the film.”
- Ted Kotcheff
“Before you say ‘cut’, wait five more seconds.”
- Win Wenders
“The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.”
- Steven Spielberg
“That’s the great thing about filmmaking: things happen you don’t know are going to happen at the end.”
- Thelma Schoonmaker
“Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes.”
- Akira Kurosawa
“Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.”
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“The biggest thing I have realized was that you have to choose you collaborators very carefully, and that not everybody can like you. The process of filmmaking is so difficult, there’s no point in doing it unless you can do it the way you want.”
- Peter Capaldi
“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you’re not a traveler, you’re a fucking tourist.”
- Guillermo del Toro
“On Everything I do I’m always taking someone’s money, whether it’s a movie studio or a record label. Somebody’s paying for it, and I’m always respectful of that. But I’m never going to compromise.”
- Spike Jonze
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
- Walt Disney
“To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.”
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
“Pain is temporary, film is forever!”
- John Milius
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
- Jean Cocteau
“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.”
- Roman Polanski
“I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that i have drawn from my career.”
- Charlie Chaplin
“I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.”
- Buster Keaton
“Filmmaking is just a very luxurious and efficient way of expressing yourself.”
- Gaspar Noe
“A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the filmmakers.”
- David Fincher
“I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
- Frank Capra
“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”
- Billy Wilder
“Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”
- James Cameron
“But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.”
- George Lucas
“I steal from every movie ever made.”
- Quentin Tarantino
“The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle. Audiences are harder to please if you’re just giving them special effects… but they’re easy to please if it’s a good story.”
- Steven Spielberg
“For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.”
- Christopher McQuarrie
“I always want the audience to outguess me, and then I doublecross them.”
- Buster Keaton
“Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
- Alfred Hitchcock
“When I’m making a film, I’m the audience.”
- Martin Scorsese
“Good directors don’t answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.”
- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
“When I looked at life through the camera, I felt like I could finally see it.”
- Katherine Howe
(when asked what a director does) “I help.”
- Krzysztof Kieslowski
“I put my ideas into practice. That may be the reason people hate me.”
- Emir Kusturica
“The good ideas will survive.”
- Quentin Tarantino
“Filmmaking is, a sort of uncontrolled process. I think it’s very important to be open to the unexpected and at the same time, of course, maintain your vision. be open to all the things you didn’t think of yourself that can make the film better.”
- Dagur Kari
“Let me just pause a minute and drink in this moment. And if you film it, I’ll be able to get free refills for life.”
- Jarod Kintz
“A movie is a little like a question, and when you make it, that’s when you get the answer.”
- Francis Ford Coppola
“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”
- Robert Altman
“The only safe thing is to take a chance.”
- Mike Nichols
“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks.”
- George Lucas
“If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.”
- Stanley Kubrick
“When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.”
- Robert Rodriguez
“If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.”
- Quentin Tarantino
