Here is a list of 10 invaluable lessons from famous filmmakers. I compiled some of my favorite quotes from the article, 100 Famous Directors’ Rules of Filmmaking. Enjoy!

1. My personal favorite! A screenplay should already be a movie in the reader’s imagination. This is the work…
Quentin Tarantino: “When I’m writing, it’s about the page. It’s not about the movie. It’s not about cinema. It’s about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That’s my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, ‘You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . ,’ I’m done.”

2. Make it universal, make it life…
Oscar Micheaux: “We want to see our lives dramatized on the screen as we are living it, the same as other people, the world over.”
Sarah Polley: “It’s been really important to me to create moments where there’s a breath or moments where there’s a laugh or moments where there’s real life that’s allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that’s what does happen in life.”

3. It’s all about the emotions…
Ang Lee: “…the ideas don’t translate in a movie. It has to have emotions. So that’s different from the book quite a bit. So it has to be an emotional journey. . . . To me, I think that to me, it’s a visualization of feelings.”

4. The passion, the passion!
Gregg Araki: “It has to be something you’re so passionate about you are willing to die to make it…”

5. Keep your focus on what it is you are writing about…
Francis Ford Coppola: “When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word.”

6. No need to force a plot, just create real characters, put yourself in their shoes and live through them…
Andrea Arnold: “When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.”

7. What to avoid at all costs…
Frank Capra: “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.”

8. The only way for the hero (and the picture) to shine…
Alfred Hitchcock: “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.”

9. The all-important ‘be you’ advice…
Wes Anderson: “They say, ‘Well, I see a lot here that you did before, and it’s connected to this other movie you did,’ and . . . that almost seems like something I don’t quite choose. It chooses me.”
Abbas Kiarostami: “I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.”
Diablo Cody: “Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one is capable of doing what you do.”

10. Daily exercise of coming back to the centre…
Stanley Kubrick: “Is it meaningful? Is it believable? Is it interesting? Those are the questions that have to be answered several hundred times a day.”

See full article here.