Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Bennett Miller

I definitely have moments in my life where I discovered a film, and the language of the film itself spoke to me in a way, as if someone came up to you and started speaking a language you'd never heard but understood and was able to express things the language you knew could not.

Honestly, my smartest business decision was to never do anything that I didn't love doing.

I am a tumbleweed. I don't have a company. I don't have a staff. I don't own anything - I've never owned a car or an apartment.

Before I find myself in the middle of a project, I want to make sure it is the kind of thing that keeps me excited for two years. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to push the proverbial rock up the proverbial mountain.

I want to work with performers who really are ready to lose their minds, you know? People who are established and have talent, but who are ready to break new ground and really be cracked open in a new way.

Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the telling of a good story. But they don't get in the way of the truth.

It couldn't be more satisfying to work on something almost anonymously for years, then to have it received affectionately with support.

I think baseball represents something closer to our experience. There's no clock in baseball; it's not over until it's over. It's like life in that there are prolonged periods of boredom and monotony, punctuated by intense moments of excitement and sometimes terror.

Mark Ruffalo is Mark Ruffalo - no explanation needed. He has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met, and he's sort of the Dave Schultz of the entertainment industry.

There is a very uneasy relationship between money and creativity, between money and almost everything. Its tendency to control and corrupt - whether it's in arts or education or politics, hardly anything is untouched by it. Journalism certainly is up there. Everything is susceptible to it.

It's amazing how much you will forgive if the behavior is truthful.

People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies.

The silence of a room when someone enters with a gun is very different from the sound that room makes when empty.

It's hard. It's hard to get a film made properly.

It's important for an actor to feel like they're really being watched and to receive feedback and encouragement about the aspects of what they're doing that feels truthful - and also to raise awareness when they might be resorting to habits and tricks, which every actor has.

For me, personally, the value of a film is not determined by a review, but the health of the film is.

I am nostalgic for those man-behind-the-curtain days when someone could get away with impersonating Kubrick because nobody had any idea what Kubrick looked like.

I'm not going to take something based on budget and do something just for the sake of it. I want to make good films.

I've never even watched one of my films since they're completed.

You make a movie and you'd like it to be appreciated, respected, embraced.

I don't want to sound too spiritual, but when you are true to yourself and follow through with things that connect with you meaningfully, somehow things fall into place.

I don't like sensationalizing events. Instead of making waves, I want to make everything settle, so we can see to the bottom of things.

If I had a dozen lives, one of them would involve really getting off the rails in India, heavy into meditation.

You can write ten versions of a scene, and then, on the day, discover that something in the original scene worked. It's hard on writers. Hard on actors, hard on editors, hard on me, hard on the producers, who require patience and confidence. But I can't get to the end without going through this process.

It's about creating an atmosphere so that characters can just live in front of the cameras. And to be sensitive, and for the actor to know the sensitivity that they are being observed with.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.

People without fathers tend to have two predominant characteristics. They tend to believe anything is possible. At the same time there's an anxiety and an unending insecurity. It's a very American thing because back in the past, we lost our fathers or father. The king.

I don't believe in God in the way I often see described by religion.

I think I approach things with an outsider's perspective.

I really tried to get comfortable with the notion of shooting digital on 'Foxcatcher' and just couldn't. I shot many tests and experimented with all sorts of techniques to manipulate it into a place that worked for us, but it just didn't happen.

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

My business life is really simple. It's like, get check. Put check in bank. Pay rent. I've never bought a stock in my life. I never got caught up in that trip. And the truth is, I don't obsess about money ever.

The one thing I'll say is I was a quiet kid. Much more of an observer than a performer.

I like going into a scene knowing that the script isn't quite finished, that there's something that isn't really going to reveal itself until something spontaneously occurs.

I think the mind has a way of getting to where it needs to get to. If you are persistent.

I think all good sports movies aren't really about sports.

There's always something happening in pretty much every moment of every scene of everything I've ever worked on in longform that's not being expressed or acknowledged.

I like to rehearse to the point we're in the ballpark, and expect that we're only going to get one proper take, more or less.

Every film requires a different process. You learn about these particular actors and the particular chemistry between these actors. Recognizing when you don't need to shoot a scene because it's going to be cut anyway.

Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself. I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary.

There's really powerful and potentially dominating forces when you make a film that can harm it if you're incapable of orchestrating things.

Silence is absorption, and when you're watching a film and you're that quiet and you're that still, at least from my experience of watching films, that indicates an absorption, where you're really in the moment. You're really present. What you're seeing is vital to you in that moment, and it's tingling, and it's alive, and it matters.

Chemistry exists or it doesn't, and I think casting is a very underappreciated component of filmmaking.

Adam Sandler in 'Punch-Drunk Love' is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant.

I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.

Every relationship probably has, at its inception, a hundred things that you could pick on and divert you from it, but the feeling is there. You figure out a way to make it work.

If you talk to anybody, among the first things you'll hear is, 'Steve Carell is the nicest guy in the world.' And he is. 'Steve Carell is the greatest guy to work with.' And he is. But all of that belies other aspects that are as true with him.

As a filmmaker, you're looking to reveal something. When other people relate to it, it makes an otherwise lonely world a little less lonely.

I am attracted to characters who are in worlds where they don't belong and who have great ambitions that they imagine will somehow reconcile themselves with the world and make things right.

I think I am missing a gene that most people have to enable them to feel happiness about success and these kind of things.

When I learned a little bit about du Pont and a little bit about Mark Schultz, I was attracted to the notion that these incredibly different people found each other and seemed, for a moment, to be the answer that each was looking for.

Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.

I think in terms of content and subjects and whatever kind of production it dictates. Can I conceive of an idea that would really connect with my personal rhythms and cost a lot of money? I don't gravitate in that direction, but it is possible.

I am attracted to anything that does not feel derivative.

I don't know of a filmmaker who does not feel buoyed and lifted when their peers embrace the work.

I have a tremendous amount of patience and tolerance when working with people, but if I ever feel the impulse to inhibit myself from doing one more take, or feel a need to apologize to someone for pushing, I know that that relationship isn't gonna last.

The version of 'Moneyball' I pitched - and we made - is about a guy, Billy Beane, who thinks he's trying to win baseball games. But it's deeper than that.

Making a film is a challenge.

It's great making a film and having it embraced and seen. I really enjoy that.

I think when an actor feels like they're being watched with great sensitivity and a subtle eye and a nose for truthfulness, that has some effect.