Jean-Marc Vallee Quotes

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The films that have influenced me most are: 'The Hustler', 'Badlands', 'Hud', 'Tender Mercies', 'Cool Hand Luke', 'A Perfect World', and 'Laurence of Arabia'. I also really like 'Fletch'. I feel like all of these films reached an honest place in regard to the human condition while also stringing together really entertaining stories.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

I am not interested in entertaining people. I think being an actor provides an opportunity to give people an experience they can connect to, reflect on, learn from, laugh at.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

The characters I write about are very internal.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

I'm always looking for something that tells me a little bit about what it means to be human. That's how I measure the success of any artistic endeavor.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

For me, with me, making a film is always about humanity.

I prefer drama; I think character-driven drama is my favorite kind of stuff to go watch, and I like being challenged by that kind of stuff in that way.

Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.

I'm not interested in going and doing a big, action-adventure romp with nothing to say about being a human being.

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.