Tom's Favorite Auteurs
Displaying auteurs 1 - 20 of 47 in total
Charles Burnett
“The impetus was the whole Civil Rights Movement and we felt we had a responsibility to reflect reality, tell the truth about the black community. To help, however we can, to march the social movement forward.”
Howard Hawks
“I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! ”
Stephen Frears
“When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”
David Cronenberg
“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”
Peter Bogdanovich
“It's a misconception about acting that it's a practice in pretending to be someone else. It's actually a practice in finding the character within yourself.”
Quentin Tarantino
“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”
Brad Bird
“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.”
Akira Kurosawa
“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied...that's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.”
David Fincher
“I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.”
David Lean
“My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.”
Jacques Demy
"He has an idea of the world he is trying to apply to the cinema or else… an idea of cinema which he applies to the world." —Jean-Luc Godard
Stanley Donen
“For me directing is like having sex: when it’s good, it’s very good; but when it’s bad, it’s still good.”
Gene Kelly
“I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn’t catch on right away.”
Vincente Minnelli
“I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work. ”
Otto Preminger
[Giving direction to a group of children on Exodus (1960)] "Cry, you little monsters!"
