Michelle Paver Quotes

I think it's particularly stupid that filmmakers have traditionally said, 'Yeah, I like baseball, but the movie's not going to be about the intricacies of the game.' I mean, you wouldn't cast an overweight guy with stubble if you were doing a ballet film.

If you are watching a fairy tale, that's why you go to fairy tales: you want these uncomplicated stories and uncomplicated characters. But if it's meant to be real life, you want there to be some reflection of your experience and have something you can hook into.

For me as an audience member, it makes the characters more relatable and interesting if they're evolving and changing - it makes them feel more real in a way. But not every cartoon is trying to be real.

And there's also not enough films that are more of a imitation of what real life looks like.

I wouldn't play the normal girl. I don't think that that's interesting or realistic, as far as how human beings really are.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

I like romance, I like glamour and I like realism. I think that's a great combination.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

I think that's important to have in something like a national television show. It's important to portray a woman realistically, and not just as a bridezilla.

The snow came up to the top of Georgie's calves - she had to lift her feet high to make any progress. Her ears and eyelids were freezing ... God, she'd never even been able to imagine this much cold before. How could people live someplace that so obviously didn't want them?

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

I'd like to see (the films) go back to the books. I think (the films) need to be dirtier. I think that you should feel the man playing Bond could die at any moment. You don't feel that any more.

One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

I don't think being flawed is a bad thing for a character... nor do I think it's a bad thing for a person in life, because that's how we all are.

Handheld camera is approximating what we're seeing when we're looking at each other, and kind of looking around, and your eyes whipping around. It adds an immediacy, where you feel like you are watching something through your own eyes, standing there with them. And that just allows you to take more liberties and have more fun with people's behavior.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Center Stage, is a huge ballet fan. He was completely open, as was Bruce Beresford, to get our perspective. "No, we wouldn't do this. Yes, we would do that. That's not realistic." So, I feel like Center Stage did well in that respect.

You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.