Michael Stuhlbarg Quotes

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.

We weave our real lives into our WWE lives. We just look at what's happening in our lives, and what can we do? What's the most annoying - as a bad guy, as a villain, what's the thing we can do to make people hate us?

There are great news anchors; they're probably very smart, but they're not talking to the audience like real people. They're just reading from a teleprompter.

Mom's a writer, so I grew up reading scripts and I have a real respect for them and I know how much thought goes into creating a role, so I'm always interested to find out what was the thought process of the writer and how best can I convey it rather than trying to change it to suit myself.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

Making Superman was so hard. We were a year over schedule. We were there a year and a half, the first time. And in a year and a half, you go through everything you go through in a life. So you can't really go, "Oh, it must have been fun to work with Chris Reeve." In a year and a half, you bonded like a family, so you know someone far too well to think something as simplistic as "Oh, it's just fun." You know their secrets. I mean, it was everything. It was truly - it's a cliché to say we were family, but we really were.

People ask me all the time how I prepare and, to tell you the truth, I think if what's on the page is rich and compelling, as far as I'm concerned, if it's beautifully presented on the page, all you have to do is put yourself there and pretend, and the rest takes care of itself. That is, unless it's a real stretch with an accent or if history matters where research has to be done.

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

There's something very cool as an actor when you have an opportunity to play somebody who's real, whether they're still alive or not, but who has lived a life.

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.

If I had not lived the life I had lived and did not have the wife I have and the children I have, I would never know how to play that role [of Dr. Bedsloe], and I wouldn't have any of those qualities. It's a real example of how it is true that the camera catches everything. Even the stuff you're trying to hide.

If there's a role you're playing and there's a great deal of material to explore because the person was real then it's a completely different preparation time and message to playing someone fictional.

I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

Because of my two films - one was about my half-sister (Kati with an I) and the next one featured my cousin (Fake It So Real) - I was hesitant to start with someone so close.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.

When you realize the writers start writing to who you are, you're basically reading reviews of yourself. And then it becomes this cyclical nightmare where I feel like I need to play into it, then I find myself acting like the character in real life.

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.

But, at the end of the day, we want to have a show where we can focus on these individuals and their relationships with each other. That's really what the show is about.

I did this movie right after it about the life of Chet Baker. It's called Born to Be Blue. In that situation, there's a real clear character you're drawing on. It's a real person. It's really exciting and interesting to do the research to figure out how to make that a nuanced, three-dimensional human being.

You put on a face for the public. The face isn't false; it's just another side of you. If it were false, you couldn't last. People want something real and natural, and if they catch you acting, you're dead. It has to look real. In order to look real, it has to be real, and I've always thought of the characters I've played as real people.

Playing somebody who's real, you can bring all kind of nuances and things to him that you get from source material and things like that, but the more popular or known the person is, the more impossible it is. To get it right, that is the goal.

Very few people actually saw Andy's films like Chelsea Girls where he filmed seven hours, ran it on two screens, where each scene was in a different room at the Chelsea Hotel with these people he called 'Superstars" who were basically super-exhibitionists - the guy in one room high on LSD talking about masturbation, Brigid Berlin in another room playing a lesbian and shooting up people with amphetamines right through their jeans, it was all real and they were really doing it (though Brigid is now a proper lady), but you know Andy really did pre-date reality TV.