Olivia Williams Quotes

Everyone has the attitude that movies aren't just disposable entertainment - they can really mean something. I love that, because that's the way I feel about films.

Some movies are the kind you take home with you at the end of the day, and some, you can let go.

You may not quite understand the cinematic tricks that go behind the making of a film, but as long as you feel it, I think that's the important thing.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

I rarely get recognized, and whenever I do, it has to do with 'The Leftovers' because it came into someone's life at a particularly important time for them - if they were dealing with grief or loss or whatever tragedy - and they just caught it. And there is no rhyme or reason to the kind of person it is.

I'm just first of all looking for a part that's well written and speaks to me.

I think of events like the Challenger and 9/11 - events that move us so much that we never quite get over them. So it's important to go back and relive those feelings in order to remember how important those events were to us.

It's wonderful to be part of a film that really reaches an audience's mind and an audience's heart.

The only films that really matter to me are the ones where there are characters whose interactions are moving.

'Premam' moved me; it was almost like seeing life play out on screen.

When 'Jewel' was screened, old friends from school and university got back in touch. More than one of them told me that their partners hated Merrick so much they could not think of having me in the house. This kind of audience identification does not happen in any other medium.

I love films that make you feel something but also deliver that payload behind jokes.

I have always wanted to work with Steven R. Monroe, and when I read his script, I was blown away! I think 'Complacent' hits a nerve that people try so desperately to avoid, which is what I love about Steven's work.

I enjoy 'Life Aquatic.' I think that one, from a visual standpoint, is just such a fun, visual movie to look at, whether it's the shots of the ship cut down the middle, that set where you can see everyone in each of their rooms doing whatever and moving about - something like that, I could watch that on a loop for an hour.

To be able to be onstage and to hear people in the audience go, 'That's my song!' It's amazing.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

Our lives are songs; God write the words And we set them to music at pleasure; And the song grows glad, or sweet or sad, As we choose to fashion the measure.

It makes me feel great, knowing my songs are being heard and of service to people.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

It's interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That's what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I'm slightly setting up the audience that there's a bit of fun involved, as well.

Normally death scenes are good, if you have a significant death scene and it means something it's like the audience has an attachment to you being killed that's a good thing.

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

Loving a film is like falling in love with a woman or with a man like you never expect it. It it's not the one you think you will be in love with, you know. You think always that he will be with a beard, and black, and big and finally he's Chinese and you know it's the same thing. There's something very organic about the film and if you forgot it, if you don't have this seed in it...this organic flavor in it the film doesn't work it's wrong.