Sarah Hall Quotes

There's such an emphasis on having a character be likable. I don't think it would be helpful if I worried about that. I mean, not everyone's likable.

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

Some of my favorite shows are ones where the characters are vile and human and flawed. That's what makes me want to keep watching a show, not writers telling me how to feel about characters.

I respond to authenticity and originality, and I've been a fan of Don Winslow's ever since 'The Power Of The Dog.'

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

I look at a show like 'Roseanne.' That's super influential on me. It's very funny, very real, with real problems. That was a big influence, and I don't know if you see that all the time in the network world.

We live lives that aren't broken into neat three-act structures. On any given day anything can happen, from the hilarious to tragic. So why can't my movies be like that?

I want more unpredictability. I want more realism. I think the fans would appreciate that, and that's what I've brought since day one.

Life ain't a drama. And life isn't just a comedy. Life is sometimes horrifying. Life is science-fiction. There are all elements and faculties that we navigate, so I just expect a script to reflect that. As long as it's truthful. I think genre-bending is just being honest.

I think flawed characters are important, because no one is perfect.

I don't want to protect my characters. I don't do it with Muslims, either. My job is not to make us look perfect. My job is to make us look messy.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

If it's strictly comedy, I like to bring some darkness to it. If it's strictly drama, I always like to lighten it up as well. I like to find some kind of dimension and make my characters human, so that it doesn't feel like a sketch and feels more like a slice of life.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.