Ron Howard Quotes

I've just always loved really good projects. The things that draw me into a new project have very little to do with genre and have more to do with the characters I'll be playing, the people I'll get to work with and things like that.

I never would rule out a great character or a great story. I don't care what the forum is. If I get to tell a story that I'm excited about, I'm in.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

I don't make the distinction between whether or not I'm going to do a TV show or movies. It's all based on material. It's about whatever comes along that I think I can add the most to, bring something to the character, and have some fun with.

I don't look at scripts in terms of commerciality. I just look at the part, the people involved.

I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.

Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'

I do a film because I like the story and I want to give life to a character - I don't necessarily have to agree with the director.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.

Directing is so interesting. You know, it just sort of encompasses everything that you see, that you know, that you've felt, that you have observed.

Sometimes I want to do something that's really funny and other times I read an indie script that is going to be made for nothing but I want to do it because I think that I can connect with something in the story.

George has only got to ring me. His imagination is so wonderful, I'd do any character he might create.

I remember thinking, 'I can't act.' Pretending to be someone else is a terrifying thought. The thing was that, along with other people, I could create a whole world. I felt absolutely right directing.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.

Actors get to go to these amazing worlds. In 'Terminator,' I was a cyborg with feelings; in 'Avatar,' I lived for 15 months on a fantastical planet, and in 'Clash of the Titans,' I get to fight a scorpion the size of a dump truck. It's a bizarre job, but you explore yourself.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

I didn't follow big box office ideas. That eventually led me to witches. It's led me to find interesting roles.

'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.