"I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to"
About this Quote
Amenabar is selling a paradox: the director as both author and conspirator, surrendering control in order to get a better kind of control. The opening clause, "I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person", reads like a preemptive defense against the standard caricature of the auteur as tyrant. But the proof he offers is carefully curated. He doesn’t abdicate authority; he shifts it. By refusing to "tell them exactly what I want", he’s not opting out of intention, he’s designing conditions where intention can be discovered rather than dictated.
The key word is "surprise". On a film set, surprise is expensive, risky, and often unwelcome. Amenabar frames it as an artistic necessity, implying confidence in his own taste as an editor of other people’s instincts. He’s describing a workflow where actors become co-writers of behavior and language, generating accidents that can read as truth on camera. That’s not laissez-faire; it’s a high-trust system with an implicit safety net: the director still decides what survives the cut.
Encouraging actors to change "verses of the script" (a telling, almost poetic slip) positions the screenplay less as scripture than as score. The subtext is a bid for authenticity: if a line feels performed rather than lived, he’d rather let the performer rewrite it than preserve the writer’s ego. Culturally, it aligns him with a contemporary, actor-centered prestige ethos: auteurs who maintain singular vision by inviting collaboration, then shaping it into something that still unmistakably bears their signature.
The key word is "surprise". On a film set, surprise is expensive, risky, and often unwelcome. Amenabar frames it as an artistic necessity, implying confidence in his own taste as an editor of other people’s instincts. He’s describing a workflow where actors become co-writers of behavior and language, generating accidents that can read as truth on camera. That’s not laissez-faire; it’s a high-trust system with an implicit safety net: the director still decides what survives the cut.
Encouraging actors to change "verses of the script" (a telling, almost poetic slip) positions the screenplay less as scripture than as score. The subtext is a bid for authenticity: if a line feels performed rather than lived, he’d rather let the performer rewrite it than preserve the writer’s ego. Culturally, it aligns him with a contemporary, actor-centered prestige ethos: auteurs who maintain singular vision by inviting collaboration, then shaping it into something that still unmistakably bears their signature.
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