Taylor Hackford
Taylor Hackford
Taylor Edwin Hackfordis an American film director and former president of the Directors Guild of America. He won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Teenage Father. Hackford went on to direct a number of highly regarded feature films, most notably An Officer and a Gentlemanand Ray, the latter of which saw him nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Picture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth31 December 1944
CitySanta Barbara, CA
CountryUnited States of America
It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.
It isn't glamorous until after the film is finished, and you are at the premiere and getting your picture on the cover of magazines.
Ray Charles, in his own way, it's like at the beginning, Ray Charles changed American music, not once but twice.
This devil loves mankind because men are going to always make the choice that will send him into ascendancy. He's been winning the game for a long time.
But, unfortunately, sometimes that affirmation creates a sense that you deserve special treatment and recognition in areas where you're not so talented.
It's much easier to work with an unknown.
I love actors and I understand what has to happen within a scene. Any scene is an acting scene and actors never act alone, so there has to be an interchange. If it's a dialog scene, if it's a love scene, it doesn't matter because you need to establish a situation.
If people are worried about the size of their trailers, I kind of say their priorities are off.
I'm not in front of the camera, they are. I encourage them; I build up as much of their confidence and ego as possible. They've got to take control; I can't act it out.
I try to get the best performance an actor can give.
The most disgusting, appalling horror of our world that we live in, to me, is sex trafficking and the enslavement of men and women, boys and girls, in the sex industry. That is the most horrific, horrific thing that's happening and it's happening in all of our towns here in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, in Paris, all over the world, and I think that's really what has to be addressed.
I make films about working class people.
I feel very comfortable shooting music, and I think you can see that.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.