John Frankenheimer Quotes on Movies (15 Quotes)

Historically the director has been the key creative element in a film and we must maintain that. We must protect that, in spite of the fact that there is new technology that's continually trying to erode that.

If you cast the picture correctly, you have a whole lot of leeway. You can make mistakes in other aspects but pull it off with the right actors.

And in Hollywood, you know, everyone is an expert. Most of them are expert editors. They can't direct, they can't write, they can't act, but, by God, they all think they can edit.

First, speaking for myself, I don't want to ever be in a position where I'm telling other directors how to make movies, because I don't think it's any of my business.

So I've had really great assistant directors for my last seven movies.

I think that you can't make a movie without a script. But you also can't make movies without actors. You also can't make movies without technicians. And there has to be just one person in charge of everybody, and to me that one person is the director.

The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie.

To do that I try and keep myself in pretty good shape physically and I try to lead my life in such a way that I'll be able to be as strong at the end of the movie as I am in the beginning.

I became kind of like the village blacksmith after the invention of the automobile, ... There just was nowhere to go. Obviously, the next thing for me was directing movies.

I look at actors very closely. It's not an accident when the actors excel.

One of the first lessons you learn as an actor is to listen.

The first assistant director runs the set. The whole mood of the movie, the whole tenor of the set comes off that person, and it's just a critical choice.

I've found that the more experts you have on a movie, the less control the director has.

I mean, this whole digital revolution is really eroding the director's importance on a movie because, number one, just from a practical standpoint, with floppy disks and the ability to put all of the film onto a disk, more people have access to the movie.

It's very eclectic, the way one chooses subjects in the movie business, especially in the commercial movie business. You need to develop material yourself or material is presented to you as an assignment to direct.