Greg Mottola Quotes

I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

My dad's more three-dimensional than Opie Taylor or Richie Cunningham. He even has a temper! He's a real person. But some people are disappointed by that.

I want to be able to show people that I have flaws and they have flaws, too. And you know what that means? No one out there is perfect.

I think what I find challenging is just trying to bring a truthfulness and a realism to a character.

Rather than, as an actor, I want the audience to like me, I'm going to smile beautifully and I've got everybody's sympathy - what about showing the moments when somebody is unbelievably petty? Or really selfish? The faults, the little things, those are the things that interested me about playing the character.

If you're going to play a character who has a deformed face, you should have a deformed face.

The most interesting people are never perfect.

The ones I love most are the people who the flaws show. I like doing characters that we see the total person. If people get afraid to show the flaws because they think, "Oh, then nobody will like them," then you end up with a lot of products, and everybody wants to be frigging heroic all the time - not what people are trapped in every day, like your skirt being in your panties after you walk out of the bathroom. Being human. Sometimes when people are drawn to your work, they're drawn because they recognize themselves or their loved ones or their neighbor in it.

A man who shows no defect is a fool or a hypocrite, whom we should mistrust. There are defects so bound to fine qualities that they announce them,--defects which it is well not to correct.

Every movie I work with the costume designer to see what feels like the character, not what Columbus would wear but what is right for the character. Outside of the armored truck standard issue security guard uniform, this guy is trying to make ends meet. He might have one pair of jeans, the same boot, maybe changes his shirt but he doesn't have a walk-in closet full of things, so I wanted something comfortable that felt like the character.

I tend to really like things that are broken, I like the ones that are perfectly imperfect.

You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.

A character to me can't be contrived. I don't like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth.

Not everyone sees you the way you do. Sometimes our imperfections are what makes us special. - Tripp

I had the good fortune early on to cast some really great people that were not just characters, they had character.

We get a little further from perfection, each year on the road, I guess that's what they call character, I guess that's just the way it goes, better to be dusty than polished, like some store window mannequin, why don't you touch me where i'm rusty, let me stain your hands

There's lots of flaws and frailties and cracks in the armor, and nobody wants to put themselves out there as some kind of Joan of Arc because none of us can live up to that, but I'm grateful to be a role model and be respected because I have a whole slew of people, men and women, that I feel the same way about.

They say real girls aint never perfect, perfect girls aint real.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed.

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

We are a very colorful family. Everybody knows our mistakes. But I think that people can relate to all of our mistakes and all or good and bad points.

When people embrace character, it informs their living, breathing moments in a scene so well.

I never play characters that are like me because I'm a boring person. I wouldn't want to see me in a movie.

The other thing - and writers can say whatever they want - is casting. You need to find a person who can inhabit that role, who can not sugarcoat the bad stuff, and not be too hard on the good stuff, but who can come across as a three-dimensional human being with some depth and some thought about what they're doing. When you find James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm, someone who can inhabit this role but still has a natural humanity to them, no matter what they're doing? It's a gift.