Mark Romanek

“From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.”

“All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.”

“I'm of the school that I will direct you if you request it - if you have a question.”

“I have these ideas that people go 'Oh, that's cool. I'd pay to see it, but I'm not gonna give you $25 million.'”

“Music videos were this lucky career opportunity. They were assignments. I was providing a service, and they were meant to be punchy and gimmicky and fun.”

“Here's my tip: Have your production hire the best hair stylists on the planet to do your films and commercials, then casually hint about how great it would be to get a trim during lunch break.”

“The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.”

“I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.”

“I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.”

“I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.”

“I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.”

“Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.”

“In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.”

“I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.”

“I learned that when you're lucky enough to be surrounded by such talented people that you really become more of an orchestrator of this talent - you're just trying to harmonise everyone's contributions.”