Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I appreciate actors who work very hard to get at the truth of the character they're playing. That speaks to me, and I try to protect that process because I value the focus and intention behind it.
Producers should have the courage of their convictions. See your project through to its fruition. Seek help and be generous enough to take on collaborators and not be territorial as you're learning.
Repression is the enemy of civilization - so keep dreaming, because the dreams we dream today will provide the love, the compassion, and the humanity that will narrate the stories of our lives tomorrow.
I was always interested in storytelling, particularly in theater and film. I liked creative things. My mom and dad are wonderful people, but both are tone deaf, so I don't know where the gene came from.
There were 100 intellectual reasons not to pursue 'Wicked.' There were times where it was very challenging, where the mind said, 'This is maybe too challenging,' but the heart willed it. The heart willed it to succeed.
Even in a manuscript form, 'The Girl on the Train' sort of leapt off the pages as a contemporary suspense drama-slash-thriller. It has all the mechanics of a thriller, but at the heart of it was a great character study.
When I first started in the business, it was hardly ever done. But today, it almost feels like studios go out and preview movies knowing full well that they're going to use the information they get to go back and reshoot.
Winning an Oscar attracts the attention of directors and other actors and creates a boost in salary, particularly for someone like Halle Berry. For an established star like Denzel Washington, the benefits are less tangible.
The financial side of Broadway is the easy part. Plenty of people want to put money in a Broadway show. The challenging part is finding the material that excites me enough to spend a couple of years of my life devoted to it.
I'm very competitive, and I want to be very successful, but at the end of the day, films to me are still films. I want them to be good, and I'll work the hardest, but at night, I go home to my life and my family, and that's where my heart lies.
I do remember feeling, 'I don't ever want to feel impotent in terms of what I can control in a business in which you can have very little control.' And that motivated me to go to law school - that, and my parents saying, 'Go to law school before you do anything.'
In any adaptation, the challenge is to take the essence of the original source of the material, be faithful to it to a point, but to also recognize that you're telling a story in a very different medium. It has to exist on its own, and it has to offer something unique to that experience.
The character we've always thought of as the Wicked Witch of the West is a green girl who's actually very good, misunderstood, and trying to make her way in the world. She's an outsider looking in, wanting to be loved. That's a universal experience that everyone's felt at some point in their lives.