Miranda July Quotes

I love the feeling I get when I'm on a set; I love reading the scripts, playing the characters, getting to be someone else.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

I love the creating part of taking on a character. It is fun to be another person and create what it would be like to be that person.

In terms of the character itself, I can't really say that I find anything really difficult. I enjoy the character so much I don't perceive difficulty in trying to be him. It's just a matter of how do we get there.

As an actor, it's amazing to get to create different characters.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

It was a big deal to me to play characters and feel things and connect to somebody in a fake world.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

My favorite characters that I've gotten to do are the ones that surprised me the most.

I love playing different and challenging characters on screen, and Newton is one such role. But I'm someone who doesn't think so much about what will happen next.

Playing interesting characters makes me feel alive.

The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.

It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I'm just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.

I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already.

I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.

It's fun to play the character and then watch him later.

I grew up doing theatre and spent a long time as a playwright. I still think very visually when I write.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

There's nothing like working with the best actors possible, and if you have a piece of material like, 'Long Way Down' or 'Love Punch,' which allows you to play, then it's just a joy to go to work.

On 'Old School,' I was not an actor, I was Snoop Dogg, so I came to the set with a whole different vibe, and a different crew of people. And on 'Starsky and Hutch,' I was more of an actor. I wasn't Snoop Dogg, the rapper.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.