A Quote by Sydney Pollack
All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.
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Well, honestly, the films I personally like to go see are smaller, more character-driven pieces, so that's why the movies I've made have been smaller, more character-driven movies.
I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.
The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.
I don't find movies interesting. I just want to do the movies that made me interested in getting into movies, and they're few and far between.
On the one hand, you have these huge budget films that cost millions of dollars. They are effects driven, they don't have well known actors in them, and they are making money. Well, some of them are. One the other hand, you have Stallone and Statham, and guys like DeNiro and Pacino, and Costner, who are all trying to make movies about real people. They are interested in character driven projects.
I pride myself on doing character-driven movies and, when my movies have worked, it's been because of the right casting and the right character, and it just clicks.
The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
Steven's Spielberg is one of the most visually talented and character-oriented directors I've ever worked with. And I learn from him every time I watch one of his movies. Good or bad - and he has made some awful movies - they're never uninteresting. He's made four or five of the greatest movies of all time. Perfect movies, like E.T. or Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan.
The best of all kinds of movies are character-driven, and I definitely don't want to lose sight of why Derek and I started to write movies together in the first place.
I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn't care what kind of movies I made.
For big Hollywood movies, I'm on the more character-driven side of the equation. So, TV is a natural place for me to be because you've got no choice, but to be character-driven.
I've made movies on every part of the spectrum, and you do understand when you go into certain movies that you're trying to elicit a certain kind of response from the audience, and people get a real sense of satisfaction when they're rooting for a character and the character pulls it off.
Everybody's been decrying the death of movie theaters for decades and, you know, people are still going to the movies in droves. It's gone down, but it hasn't gone down that much. I think the biggest change has been the emergence of cable and streaming on television. That has really had a dramatic effect, and I think it's a positive one. I think there's really good work going on there, and as movies stratify to being these gigantic tentpole movies, and small movies, I think it gives another outlet for character-driven material.
Most people are interested in seeing 27-year-old women who are in movies somehow connected to sex. It's interesting to everyone. Especially little movies that are having trouble getting made, there's always sex.
I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.
It's hard to really get that excited about movies. Think about it like this: how many good comedy movies come out a year? Maybe one or two? And then, in those movies, what are the chances that there's a character that I'm the best fit to play? It's really small!
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