If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success
You can read all the books about film-making, all the articles in American Cinematographer and that sort of thing, but you have to really see how it works on a day-to-day basis, and how to pace your energy so that you can survive the film, which was a lesson that took me a long time to learn.
People call me a perfectionist, but I'm not. I'm a rightist. I do something until it's right, and then I move on to the next thing.”
Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.
A director`s job is to make something happen and it doesn`t happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don`t bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn`t be doing it.
I wanted someone who was extremely fast and agile.
I mean, you have to be able - you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.
- James Cameron.
