As far as working with actors, I feel very comfortable working in that aspect of directing.

The Director’s Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job...

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

I still don’t know much about directing a movie.

That’s what I love most about writers–they’re such lousy actors.

But I didn’t know much about directing a movie.

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

I do like directing other people’s material.

I love writing. I think writing and directing go hand in hand.

The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough...

First of all, it was in my contract. I knew I would be directing an episode.

As a storyteller, when you’re writing a movie and when you’re directing, you want to keep people entertained. That’s the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

Directing is physically exciting because there’s a ticking clock, you’re working with people, it’s very social, it’s very enjoyable.

It’s such a strange combination that I’d be unhappy to make anything like that without Landis directing.

Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers—anyone who wants to work in...

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life...

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

I had a philosophy, which may have been proven right, that directing isn’t as hard as everyone says it is.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That’s something I want to see again. In terms...

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she’d been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She’d gone once, twice,...

The time to act is now! Somebody go get the Director.

Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see...

We made love like two shy people who acted like we’ve never acted in front of a camera before. Aside from the lead actor, I was also the producer, director, cameraman, and financier.