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Sam Mendes Quotes


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.

Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.

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

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

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.

This is the first time in 10 years I don't know what I'm doing next, and I'm rather enjoying it. Soon I'll be climbing the walls no doubt, but right now, it's not clear, I'm just enjoying the freedom.

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

When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don't want to see black and white.

You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all.

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.

You think about taking audiences on a journey.

You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't.

You've got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie's good enough, it's going to survive; and if it's not, well, it won't.

You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.