Sam Mendes Quotes on Movies (30 Quotes)


    I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.

    I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.

    You make the movies for audiences. You get as many people to see the movie as possible. You do not make them for Academy voters. There are only 6,000 and me. It's going to get at least one vote. I'll vote across the board for my movie.

    I found that it was one of the things that attracted me to this project. It's the idea that you train a huge group of men to go to war, and then what happens when you take away the war, what happens during that period of time, which is really at the center of the movie. They turned on themselves and each other. They create their own warsAll the war literature that I had read had been about combat, and here was a story about there being no combat even though you're trained to kill.

    Comparing the two actors, Jarhead ... They're alike in some ways, both great listeners, but they react very differently. Jake is reacting to everything that passes him by, and is very readable in his reactions, whereas Peter has mastered watching as an art. He sits on it and holds it, holds it, holds it, and then it all explodes in a volcanic way. But they were both right on the edge.


    I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.

    I'm from the theater, where the process of creating a character from the ground up is something that's not imposed on him. We started working on it months in advance, and we rehearsed for two weeks, and even the look of his apartment came out of discussions with him and the production designer.

    I want to try and work in different genres with different types of actors, on small movies and big movies.

    There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.

    Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.

    I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself.

    It took me a long time to film the plastic bag, and then I had to get the cut of the scene right. But if you find it as beautiful as the character does, then suddenly it becomes a different movie, and so did he as a character.

    The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It's about what goes on before the movie starts.

    I am not a master-class director. I am not a teacher. I am a coach. I don't have a methodology. Each actor is different. And on the film set, you have to be next to them all.

    It's very hard doing a period movie. You have to do everything, from the streetlamps to covering up the road markings. Every bystander has to be in period costume. You have to plan very carefully.

    Actors get used to scenes being cut.

    One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this.

    I wanted to keep exploring... I'm not about to choose a series of movies in which I can use the same bag of tricks and style that I used in the first film.

    For me, certain shots or scenes are keys in the movie.

    As I got everything wrong at the same time-costume, design and performance-it made it easier in a way, because I could see the film I didn't want to make.

    Directing, I realize, on film is far more personal, you know. Cinema really is a director's medium. This is a very personal film.

    Tony's book confronts head-on the idea that the reason the men joined up is because of these movies. It gave me the opportunity to shoot this moment where you're shooting a bunch of guys about to go to war who are watching a movie about a bunch of guys at war, knowing that our film will be seen by a bunch of guys who are possibly going to go to war. It's all a weird discussion of how movies affect us.

    Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

    You try to explain what you see. You have to do it with everyone. You're explaining how it looks, how it feels, its atmospheres and colors, what you feel thematically, what you feel the film is reaching for. You hope that they want to make it with you.

    Just because I hold a shot for more than five seconds and it's all a deliberate tableau, people say it's theater. It's not really.

    One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films.

    Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.

    You just never know when movies are going to take off or not. The lucky thing about this was that it didn't cost a lot of money, and therefore there wasn't loads of pressure on me.

    In terms of being an outsider in America and having a certain type of objectivity to a degree, there were a few times I thought to myself What on earth am I doing here I'm a Brit making a movie so firmly set in the States

    It's a risk casting anyone against type or what they're known to do. But there's one thing better than having a great actor, which is having a great actor who's never done what you're asking him to do. He's hungry to get out of the trailer every day and hungry to test himself.


    More Sam Mendes Quotations (Based on Topics)


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