Many entertainment professionals refer to cinema as the “art of filmmaking,” because the aesthetic elements of the field give filmmakers a wide outlet for their ideas, enable them to exercise their creativity through screenwriting and directing, and creators can express themselves and represent different experiences socially and culturally. Its narrative is broad and poignant.

In this report, we learn about the answer of 5 prominent directors to the question, “Why do we make films?”

Coppola and risk before death

Francis Ford Coppola is an American director, film producer, and screenwriter of Italian descent who won an Academy Award 5 times. He is considered one of the leading figures in the New Hollywood film movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema of all time.

Coppola says that cinema began in the world as a beautiful experience, but after years it turned into a commercial industry aimed at making money without risk, but without risk it is not possible to create beautiful art that has never been made before. Coppola was never afraid to take risks, and his philosophy about risk was that it was better to take a risk before dying than to regret not taking a risk.

Coppola believes that the risk is not in safe commercial filmmaking, but in artistic filmmaking, in which the director risks actors, writers, producers, and of course he risks ideas, so he emphasizes that the director must discover the film’s theme in a clear, essential sentence that helps him make difficult and simple decisions in the film.

He gives, for example, do you want the hero with long or short hair, with a beard or without, and what exactly does he wear? All these details can be chosen depending on the essence of the film and knowledge of its subject, which always helps the director and facilitates his task when he is not sure of the course he should take.

Steven Spielberg tells of his alienation in his films

Steven Alan Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is an influential figure in the era of New Hollywood and a pioneer of modern blockbuster films. He is the most commercially successful director in history. He won the Academy Award twice.

Spielberg says about the reason he makes films that his imagination is never extinguished, and his energy for making films never runs out, and as he grows older, he views films as a moving miracle, and he does his best to present good stories.

Spielberg used films to deal with his personal reality and his own traumas, and this appears in the film “The Fabelmans” (2022), in which he presented his autobiography and so it was, of course, a film about films.

In most of Spielberg's films, we find a story that is apparent to the viewer from the beginning, in addition to ideas that are included in the films in indirect ways, such as the fear of the unknown in the movie “Jaws”, and such as the desire for control, unlimited human ambition, and the desire for revenge in Jurassic Park.

All of these ideas are ultimately due to Spielberg's personal life, his upbringing in a broken family, and his constant feeling of alienation and lack of belonging, which affected his ideas and thus his films.

Scorsese and his life memories

Martin Scorsese, American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of the most famous directors in Hollywood. He won the Best Director Award at the Oscars for the film “The Departed,” and was nominated for this award 5 times. His most famous film: Taxi Driver, for which he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976.

Scorsese says he has always had a desire to tell stories, a desire that never ends. Scorsese was born in the Little Italy district of Manhattan, in the 1950s. He was a sick and weak young child, not accustomed to group activities such as playing football in the street or clashing with his comrades. He lived among the culture of the Italian-American working class, which was closed in on itself and did not accept change.

His father used to take him to the cinema and theater in his childhood, and he even changed his ideas after he intended to become a Catholic priest, deciding to move towards filmmaking because he was influenced by the films of Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and Stanley Kubrick.

Scorsese attended New York University's film school and became first a film teacher and eventually a director. Scorsese treated each of his films as an internal struggle, with the church telling him that people were good, but his reality telling him otherwise, so he wanted the main characters in his films to feel that deep tornness that he had always felt.

Pedro Almodóvar: Cinema is my life

Spanish director and screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar states that his first ambition was to become a writer, but he discovered that his greatest talent was telling stories through images, and when he discovered filmmaking as a means of telling stories, he felt as if he had discovered something of his nature.

When Almodóvar was nine, his father sent him to a Catholic boarding school. He had a beautiful voice and the priests admired him, but he hated authoritarian education and looked for a freer world to belong to, and cinema was that new world.

He and his brother Augustin, who was 7 years younger than him, became regular moviegoers. Almodovar watched Luis Buñuel and Bergman's films, and through cinema he explored strange, unusual worlds, which made him feel the power of knowledge.

Over time, he realized that he not only wanted to watch films, but also to make them, and when he was seventeen, he returned from Catholic school and told his parents that he was moving to Madrid. Upon his arrival in the capital, he worked in various jobs and played secondary roles in cinema, and in 1969 he began writing the script for his first feature film.

Christopher Nolan unites with movies

Christopher Nolan, British-American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He has many films to his credit that achieved great commercial and critical success in the early twenty-first century. The profits of his ten films exceeded US$4.7 billion worldwide and received a total of 26 Academy Award nominations.

For Nolan, films are a completely subjective thing, about his likes and dislikes, because he has been fascinated by photography and filmmaking since his childhood. For him, what matters to him in the film is to feel one with it.

“I want to feel like the people who made this movie think it's the best movie in the world, and they put everything they had into it,” he says. “I want to identify with the movie.” This sincerity that Nolan desires is the principle he adopts when making his films. Every time he decides on a new project, he tries to make films that he believes strongly in, and wants to watch as one of the audience.

Nolan does not differentiate between making a short or a long film. He loves making films and finds it a lot of fun, but he finds it easier to organize and manage the resources for short films.