The nature of the beast is that film is a director's medium. It's not a Tracy Letts play, it's a John Wells film. 'August: Osage County,' as a play, is done. Written. On the shelf. It'll be performed in its entirety for years.
The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while you're discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, you're also discovering it with your fellow actors. We're all in it...
When you see a bad romantic comedy, you see the script, the director, and the actors trying to create this warmth and this pathos and this feeling that you care about them. That cannot be manufactured - it's either there or it isn't.
Plan B is really a little garage band of three people, and our mandate has been to help get difficult material, that might not otherwise get made, to the screen and to work with directors we respect.
I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.
The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks.
I can tell you that from the director's chair, young actors love to be challenged, to be given killer lines that take time to wrap their mind around.
I love working with the same actors repeatedly. That happens a lot. It's kind of inevitable, especially if you work with the same writers and directors and you start to form a company of actors. You gravitate towards each other.
I'd love to direct a film, but I don't think I have the temperament for it. I'm very hyper, and I want things to be done ASAP. If I turn director, I might end up killing my actors.
Music video directors, who conceive, write and direct these works, enjoy no creative rights, receive no ongoing financial benefit from the sale of our work, and many times are not even credited.
Directors are not worried about casting beautiful women, but they are not sure that they want to cast great-looking men. My looks have prevented people from seeing my work.
With movies, so much of it is, 'Who is the human being that is going to be directing it?' Because it is their medium. In a way, you are serving the director, and when it is someone that you feel you can have a lot of confidence in, it can make a big ...
How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
I want all my films to look distinctly different, like some other directors I admire. But in a way, I can't really take myself completely out of the movies I make.
When I first started acting in movies - as probably a lot of naive young actors do - I made a list of directors that I wanted to work with and sent it to my agent at the time.
I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
Movies are a director's medium, and they end up getting less credit than actors. They get the flak if the movie doesn't do well, and the actor walks away with most of the credit if the film does well.
I'm a theatre person, that's who I am. I'm happy to make sojourns into the world of movies but I'm basically a theatre director that potters off and does a couple of movies.
I don't worry about what everyone wants to see. I make movies that please a writer, director and myself. I always think there are enough people smart as me and sensitive as me.
We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.
[last lines] [Director's Cut] Gaff: [voiceover] It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?
