Film School Quotes by Morten Tyldum, Lauren Miller, Jeph Loeb, Sean Penn, Lucy Dacus, Jim Coleman and many others.

I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That’s when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
I went to film school, worked as an assistant, and wrote several scripts that haven’t gotten made.
I went to Columbia film school; that’s where I met Matthew Weisman. We then became writing partners, graduated, and moved out to Los Angeles. I didn’t know a soul.
Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I’m able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.
In film school, you get skills, but then you get lackey jobs, working on projects that you probably don’t care about. And there’s something in me where I just couldn’t bring myself to edit some misogynistic rom-com or movies that I would have hated to be a part of. So I knew I just wouldn’t get any work because of that.
I actually went to film school and was making experimental films for a short time, so it wasn’t such a leap.
I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t graduate college with an acting degree or a theater degree. I didn’t have the traditional route of training.
I’ll have a sentence in my head that’s kind of beautiful and interesting, but I’m not sure why or where it’s coming from. So it’s kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it’s the exact opposite of my film school experience.
As an ardent supporter of the Nietzschean conception of the eternal recurrence, I firmly believe that one cannot validate the totality of a life unless one accepts and embraces all the experiences that comprise it. That said, I sometimes wish I’d gone to film school.
I always wanted to be a filmmaker and became one through sheer single-mindedness. I came to filmmaking from a background in graphic design. I went to film school at Newcastle Polytechnic.
Back in ’98 or so when I was in film school I was working on lighting for a movie in Georgia, out in the middle of nowhere at a gas station. Inside the gas station they had a bunch of old home remedies like castor oil, and one of them was a protein supplement called Beef, Iron & Wine. I just dropped the Beef part.
Every film you see in film school takes on a heightened importance in your life.
I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don’t have a script as your bible.
When I was in film school, I was learning more theory than practice.
I ended up going to NYU for film school – close to Pennsylvania – but we talked about what if I went to UCLA or USC, and my mom’s whole world was caving in.
One of the most telling things about film school is you’ve got a lot of students wandering around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie.”
I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I’m working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what’s happening in all corners simultaneously.
I’m in film school, so I really have to sock away my money for school, tuition, and so on, and I really don’t have time.
I’ve had much more down in my life than I’ve had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, “What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career.”
When I was in film school I was learning more theory than practice.
I started learning filmmaking by joining a weekend film school in Bengaluru. I made some amateur short films that got appreciation from people around me.
I like acting, but I like filmmaking better. I went to film school. I want to make films.
I’ll definitely say that, before film school, I didn’t have much of a film-history background. I didn’t know much about classic cinema.
I didn’t go to film school. My Grampa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn’t go to film school; he went to theatre school. It’s interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it’s more important to learn about writing and working with actors.
In film school, I knew I wanted to be a director, but I found out pretty damn quickly that nobody was just going to hand me a script to direct.
Most of all, I really wanted to become a filmmaker, and I’ve used every acting experience to just turn it into film school.
It was the beginning of film for television. So we had all of these great opportunities. Northwestern was probably the only major film school of its kind at the time that was graduating anybody important.
I’m completely self-taught. I absolutely don’t believe in art or film schools!
There’s a lot of dopes in life, and in film school. The interesting people are usually easy to find.
One of the great things going on in Chicago is the educational facilities here. And the largest film school in the world is right here in Chicago: Columbia College.
I’m not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I’m going to fight you.
I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I’m interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for – trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn’t normally appeal to.
I always wanted to direct movies. That’s what I set out to do. When I was a little kid I just dreamed of making movies, and I went to film school [at Northwestern University].
Maybe not many women are going to film school.
I wanted to do comic books… as a comic book artist, as an illustrator. But I’m not very good so I thought I should do something else! So I went to a film school when I was seventeen and came out when I was nineteen.
I went to Princeton to major in comparative literature. I never went to film school, but I studied storytelling across mediums – poems, literature, film, and journalism.
People need to understand that hip-hop that has gun talk is just for entertainment; similar to if you were watching a movie. Film schools don’t have anything against movies with violence.
I was out in L.A. and I had gone to film school and I was out here for a couple of years. For a lot of years, I was bartending and having a good time.
It’s been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.
When I met David Green at film school he always used to offer free haircuts – he was kind of an artisan. In a lot of our films, he’s constantly trying to give me weird looks.
The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don’t give the students an idea of what’s happening.
Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn’t the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn’t seen anybody else.
I told my mother I wanted to be an actress, and the next thing I know is that I’m studying in a very expensive film school.
I even went to film school at School of Visual Arts in New York City. And then, after that, I got a day job at Universal publicity department, then moved over to Disney publicity department. So I had this day job, and at night I would study music.
I’d like to go to NYU business school and then go on to film school.
I think I’ve always wanted to direct, but I didn’t go to film school. I was lucky enough to work in movies, and I think those became my film school in terms of acting and watching directors work and also writing and co-writing and producing.
When I was going to film school, before film school, my hero was David Lynch.
We were studying at Newport Film School, and I found that the only way for me to make films – because you need people and you need equipment – was that I had to be a student.
I didn’t go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.
When I was in NYU Film School I drove a taxi in New York for two years, I felt like I owned my own business with that little taxi.
Knowing what I do now, I don’t know if I’d ever have the balls to go to film school, with no connections and no knowledge of the business side at all.
After film school, I would write 8 hours a day on film and 8 hours a night on TV, and then sleep once and a while.
I was at the University of Miami, and I still had, like, a semester or so left. And through the film school, I found out that Al Gore was launching a new TV network; they were looking for passionate young storytellers to transform television, which was, like, ambiguous but magnificent-sounding.
There’s a great deal of women in film school. I was not the only woman in my class at UCLA. When I went through the Sundance program, it was half women and half men.
I was always screwing around with music, but I really wanted to go to film school when I was in high school. I guess what happened was that I didn’t get into Tisch, that’s what happened. I got deferred. And I went to Hampsire and ended up making music like everybody else there.
I think everything that you do, you’re learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that’s one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking.
Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don’t relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater; you stay in control through the very end.
You can do all the film school you want in classrooms, but if you are on the set, you are going to learn so much more because you are really in the middle of doing it.
I just use all the skills that I learned in film school, and I just incorporate them into my sketches. People don’t realize that, with a story, there has to be a beginning, middle and end. There has to be a problem and a resolution. Just because it’s six seconds doesn’t mean it’s not a story.
I came out of film school and went after movies that I thought audiences wanted to see or that the studios wanted, as opposed to the movies that I wanted. Over the last 10 years, I’ve gravitated more and more toward the films that I grew up loving – classic Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron and Ridley Scott movies.
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.
Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.
After working with so many great actors and acting students in film school, it was a whole other thing working with Luke [Kirby].
When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn’t get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead.
I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.
When I started this profession, I wanted to make films that entertain but that have content. When I went to film school, they made me believe that the two could not mix.
I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.
My job as an actor has inspired generations of children to become doctors. My job as a writer has opened up the minds of millions. My job as a director has produced masterpieces that will be taught in film school for ages.
I didnt go to film school, i went to films
It wouldn’t have existed without France, and it’s a French initiative. As a filmmaker, I owe everything to France – I got accepted at a French film school that takes six directors a year. Once you’re in, you make films under the eye of people in the industry. You grow up in front of their eyes.
I think a lot of directors, they come out of film school, they don’t know anything about acting. Or they’re writers that don’t know anything about the process. And I think they’re afraid sometimes to talk to actors and be honest with actors.
Sometimes I wonder how my filmmaking would have been affected by film school but in the end I’m glad I got to figure it out on my own.
I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.
There’s a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.
USC Film School always had a real sense of drama and lineage.
I was a kid who went to film school and fell into acting.
I went to film school and wanted to learn everything there was about making movies.
I didn’t go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
You don’t necessarily need to go to film school to learn that part of it. But what I valued was that it gives you that incubation and time to figure out who you are, what kind of stories you want to tell, and how you want to forge your path.
While still a young student at film school, I was lucky enough to get a golden ticket to a Martin Scorsese master class at BAFTA in Piccadilly: fancy, but technically still ‘the flicks’.
The public scrutiny element they don’t teach you in film school. So few people are ever subjected to it.
I knew when I was about 14 that I wanted to be a director and that I wanted to go to NYU for film school.
Someone said to me, early on in film school… if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.
When I switched to screenplays – ’cause I had done musicals and plays – the first assignment in film school was, you have to write a silent film. And it’s tremendously helpful to learn how to do that because dialogue can be a crutch. If you can master a silent film, you’re golden.
I keep joking that I’m in Jason Reitman Film School, because I keep asking him questions every single day about directing and I have a list of things that he’s told me to do and not do and I definitely couldn’t learn from a better person.
I thought about going to NYU film school – that was this ideal to me. But I didn’t make any kind of grades in high school.
Acting is always going to be number one, but what I learned in film school, I want to make that happen too, so Im going to actually start working on my own.
I think you get out of film school what you put into it. If you don’t care about making movies, film school will do you no good.
The informing idea of what you want to say and do, that’s what will take you from film school to professional – the idea. That’s what is original to you.
Working on ‘2001’ was my film school. Stanley Kubrick was my mentor.
I got into film school thinking I was going to make features, like every other film geek.
When I was in film school at USC, I wrote my thesis script about a woman on Wall Street – specifically a woman who used to work at Morgan Stanley, sort of based on her life. Through that process, I did some research.
I didn’t go to film school. I had been an actor in movies, I had been in plays, and then I just sort of jumped into it.
I started out at Procter & Gamble marketing panty liners, so basically selling women insecurity. I thought there must be more to life than this. Then I was on set for a Dr. Scholl’s commercial, and I asked one of the execs, ‘How do you get a job behind the camera?’ and he said, ‘Film school.’ So I quit and applied to NYU.
I’ve learned from every director I’ve worked with. Everybody’s style is very different, and I always say that being an actor is the best film school that I could ever go to.
I went to film school, so I certainly know how to make things quickly and cheaply. But at the same time, I have the experience of working with Steve Starkey for three years. I watched him produce some gigantic movies.
I didn’t go to film school, I went to acting school.
I got into film school. I went and didn’t know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t know you needed light to expose film.
When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the ’50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.
If I wasn’t a trader, I would probably be in the film business in some capacity and writing in some other form. I went to NYU Film School and London Film School.
I did not go to film school.
I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.
I remember when I was in film school. It was my second year, and some kid did – had this really over-religious symbolism; like, it said ‘John 3:16’ and had angels falling over, and it was just this insane – it wasn’t that great.
My film school is making movies. But, I do think that being an actor has served me immensely, as both a writer and director, in terms of knowing what is playable and what will be fun to play, for actors, and also how to communicate to actors on set, and not screw them up and get them in their head.
I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn’t have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.
A lot of directors straight out of film school are very technically minded, but they don’t have an understanding of actors or how to talk to them.
My early films look terrible! I didn’t know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.
My father is a teacher; my mother was a telecom employee. I come from Palermo; I was raised in Ethiopia. I am homosexual. I didn’t go to film school.
Honestly, on so many levels, I feel like motherhood has prepared me even better for directing than film school because all it is is troubleshooting and dealing with different personalities and emotions and trying to make everybody happy and at the end of the day reaching your own personal goals and agendas.
Film school was a privilege I could not afford.
Now we’re here in 2009. My boys are 16 and 18, one’s going to USC film school, and the other seems to be a natural comedian. So now I have to go back into show business as a senior comedian. So I hope to get Walter Brennan-type roles, Gabby Hayes kind of stuff, be the old-timer. We’ll see what happens.
Oh my God, I love UCLA so much. Their film school is great because it’s unstructured, so there’s a freedom to fail in there and just tell your story, and everybody makes a film. It’s so important to have that freedom in film school because that’s what you’re there for: to learn and make a film.
I don’t want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven’t studied cinema can’t appreciate it. By the same token, I don’t want to be the guy who’s making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.
I studied economics. I studied industrial engineering. It wasn’t until later, when I was around 26, that I really decided to go to film school.
At the time I left film school there wasn’t a lot of hope for young film-makers. It was a calling card of film school to be quite slick and commercial, which might lead to getting some stuff on telly.
I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected.
To be a director, you have to think you’re the best. Ever since I went to film school, I imagined that you have to think deep down that you want to be Martin Scorsese or you want to be P.T. Anderson. Like, am I as good as those guys? Absolutely not. I feel like I keep learning, and I feel like I keep getting better.
I love films from all these different points of views that used the idea of the school as a way to talk about the American experience. It took me a while to figure how to write a movie like that, because that’s not something you learn at film school
When I watch my early documentaries, they’re very eclectic. They don’t follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn’t. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant.
Directing ain’t about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn’t want to go to film school. I didn’t know what the point was. The fact is, you don’t know what directing is until the sun is setting and you’ve got to get five shots and you’re only going to get two.
I know, when I was in film school, some of my films were silly, but a lot of them were more dramatic. I don’t think I intentionally set out to do comedy stuff. I guess that’s a consequence of coming up working with David O. Russell and skewing toward those sensibilities.
I was at the National Film School and was a cinematographer there. I got quite a lot of experience on documentary film-making and with directors who were interesting – maybe they weren’t using scripts or were using non-actors.
I might do a film someday for the collection. I love designing sets and creating environments, in film school and for my own presentations. I love telling stories.
I knew from early on I would go to film school and try to work behind the camera.
When I started acting, my mom said, “If you want to go to film school and eventually direct, being on set is probably the best film school in the world.” I’m incredibly grateful for the career I’ve had, but I was an actor to be a part of movies and TV, not the other way around.
Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It’s not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.
I had been accepted to film school, but my parents couldn’t afford it, and yet they made too much money for me to get a scholarship.
I went to Bournemouth Film School for 3 years.
I got interested in the justice system. If I was, I’d probably be a defense lawyer. I was headed that way, but luckily changed my track to film school.
You don’t necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn’t necessarily mean money or winning the lottery.
I was this classic film school snob who thought mainstream cinema was synonymous with bad cinema.
I really learned a lot when I worked on my grandpa’s film ‘Twixt’ and got to be with him start to finish and sit next to him every day. That was my film school.
‘Lord of the Rings’ was going on; like, my college years were the years of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ an awesome time to be in film school.
I’m not coming from film school, I learned cinema in the cinema watching films.
All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn’t study at film school or any of those things. I didn’t bother with film theory.
I wanted to be a cartoonist, and then I wanted to go into film – not as an actor, but as a writer-director – and then I found myself during film school at the University of Southern California listening to the Clarence Thomas hearings in class on my Walkman, and I realized L.A. was not really for me.
I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.
Consequently, their school [film-school ] was the school of life, and it was very much reflected in their work.
I’m starting at USC’s film school for directing this month. I’ll try to get a semester in at a time. I’ll have to take time off for work throughout school, but it will be nice to get through a little bit.
I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
My heroes were people like Jim Jarmusch. Scorsese was my god. Spike Lee was exciting, doing exactly what we thought we were going to do: personal movies based in, and about, New York. My heroes were all participating in an economic model that was collapsing as I was finishing film school.
When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you’re required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.
I was a political science major before I transferred into film school.
I’ve never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger.
NYU Film School was the way to learn about film, to be exposed to film, to go to repertory houses, to be exposed to New York and see films. I would go to the library and see one, two or three movies a day.
In film, I don’t think I’d try directing. Maybe one day, but I’d certainly want to go to film school or something before I tried to do something like that. That would be quite scary.
I studied in a Catholic school in Oahu, and I went to a film school in New York.
I wish I had gone to a film school.
I almost became a music major, but somehow I was so enthralled with the camera and becoming a director that I stuck with film school and theatrics.
Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school – you’re always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.
To me film school was film history because there weren’t a lot of books out there that I had access to.
I grew up loving watching movies, and at a certain point, I started to become fascinated with making movies. Then I went to film school, and I got to dabble with different aspects of moviemaking, and I ended up settling heavily into editing – editing was what I was really adept at, had a passion for.
I loved David Lean, he had a huge influence on me when I was going to film school.
When I was in Hungary in December I was looking at student films and I could not tell which ones were shot on film and which ones were shot digitally. I think that is because the filmmakers in Europe go to four years of film school and learn the techniques.
Acting is always going to be number one, but what I learned in film school, I want to make that happen too, so I’m going to actually start working on my own.
I’ve always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller. I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That’s when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
I didn’t go to film school.
You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, ‘We’re not the place for you to make films,’ so you decide you have to make a film yourself.
I did go to a film school in Sarajevo. I studied film and theatre directing. There was a war raging in the country while I was studying, and we did not have neither electricity nor cinemas for three and a half years.
So I just came out here to Los Angeles with a bunch of buddies I had gone to film school with. You know, for better or worse, we just tried to slug it out here.
I went to the University of Toronto to study the history and theory of film, in the back of my mind thinking I’d go to NYU film school and see if I could make a career of it.
I was at film school when I made ‘Small Debts’ and I was a cinematographer, so I didn’t actually study to be a director.
I didn’t go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.
I went to film school to make films just because you’re in control of the story.
I don’t have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they’re useless, because I’ve had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.
I began my filmmaking career by shooting a feature length documentary in China in 2004, the year I graduated from film school.
I learned how to direct by being in the trenches of movies. Getting to be a student from the inside looking out, and if you’re a respectful observer you can sponge lots of information. That was my film school.
When I got on my first set, I watched what the cinematographer was doing, and at that level in film school, the cinematographer has the most control. They’re the one looking through the viewfinder, carrying the camera, framing the shots.
I actually went to film school, but I didnt like it. Im basically self-taught.
I didn’t go to film school; I studied fine art – I learned how to be a filmmaker on everybody else’s money.
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’
When it was time to go to college, I was going to apply to Boston University for journalism, and dad said, ‘Why not apply to NYU film school, because you love telling stories and taking pictures?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I can do that for a job? Cool!’
Almost all the movies I’ve directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.
I’m a believer in film school.
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That’s where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, “You don’t belong here. Get out. Go to film school.”
I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn’t me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.
I wrote the screenplay for ‘Water Lilies’ while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself.
I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn’t get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.
I spent a lot of time making music and touring around the country and living the weird life. I was just trying to keep a job and get by. So in a lot of ways, I went through a strange version of film school. So you live through a lot of things, and put them into your work.
You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
I went to film school; I went to NYU film school.
I actually went to film school, but I didn’t like it. I’m basically self-taught.
I just feel like it’s so amazing every few years when I’m not making a film to act and basically go back to film school and just watch other filmmakers work and try to be a part of somebody else’s vision. So I feel like you do use two very different parts of your brain, and it’s great to be able to jump back and forth.
I can’t even remember not wanting to go to film school.
I went to USC film school, briefly, which is a very traditional film school.
Now everybody’s got a video camera, so go make videos with your friends or see if you can get a part in a film school thing that’s being done.
I think I could probably make $5 to $10m movies for a very long time and live a perfectly good life doing it. I’d probably get paid as well as a surgeon, which is pretty damn remarkable for a guy who went to film school.
‘Beyond the Lights’ was my fourth film. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I’m excited to share that with young filmmakers because I know how lost I was coming out of film school with that question of ‘What’s next?’
I’ve made some great movies. ‘Risky Business’ still stands up. It’s timeless. They study that film in film school.
I did not go to film school.
A lot of the guys that work for Warners and make these big films there all come from the same film school. Like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, Tarsem Singh – they all went to Art Center in the College of Design. And there’s a certain expectation when these guys graduate.
Film school was frustrating for me at first but I met some cool people like Lucia Zucchetti – she was amazing.
Going to film school just made me love it. Before film school, I didn’t really think much of acting. I was more into making music, but going to school and learning about it every day, it made me grow profound respect for the art.
I was happy when I got into film school. I’d simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in – nothing else – although I do believe they shouldn’t have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can’t understand why they took me. Probably because I’d tried three times.
I was in film school as an undergrad with a focus on directing. Once I started working on shoots, I realized, ‘Oh, I really like this cinematography thing.’
Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.
Film school didn’t prepare me for the fact that you have to manage so many different personalities at every stage, and I learned nothing about what to do when a movie was finished.
I steal from every movie ever made.