-
I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.
-
I think 'Manchester' is really about grieving and trying to get on after something terrible has happened to an adult, and a whole life being destroyed, and then, what are the forces that keep him involved with the people he loves? They love him, and they won't let him go.
-
It's not a character flaw to become an adult.
-
I've done a lot of assignment work in my life, and the only way you can do it is to make it your own as quickly as possible, and then you give it back.
-
You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.
-
I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.
-
Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.
-
I know there are some actors who won't switch their accents off when they're on set and like to be called by their character's names. That works for them, and that's great.
-
I love 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.'
-
There's something about the impact of a big screen that means something to me, even though I realize almost every film is fated to be seen for a year in theaters, and then forever after on television.
-
Little kids grow up discovering the world that's shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.
-
I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to.
-
Truthfully, and I don't mean to sound naive, but I don't know that much about the film business.
-
I think I have never seen a humorless movie that was any good to me.
-
The theater is often seen as comical in the movies; to me, it's not comical - it's my life. I don't mean that it can't be comical, but it's not only comical.
-
I remember the kind of teenager I was, the kind of teenager I wanted to be, and then the kind of teenagers that were all around me. Life is lived on such a big scale in those years - and such an embarrassing one as well.
-
I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.
-
I actually think storyboards are great. I don't draw well enough to do them myself. I've only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in 'Margaret': one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.
-
There are so many details in a movie that it's amazing how much work you'll do to change what adds up to not that much material.
-
If you're going to make a statement, I think you should write it in prose and make a statement. If you have characters who are mouthpieces for a point of view, then you have to be very clever about disguising it.
-
To me, 'director's cut' means that what was released before was somebody else's cut. That, to me, always implies that what was released wasn't what the director wanted.
-
I do a lot of improvising when I'm writing, and I work very hard on the scripts... they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.
-
I love accents, I love listening to people talk, I like to try to emulate it as accurately as I can.
-
I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.