Ellen Page Quotes

After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector.

I can be so blown away by story lines.

For 'A.D.,' when I got the script, I was really moved, because even though it told a story that I knew all my life, it was told in a different way. It was told from a very personal point of view.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

I became an actress to provoke people and move people and to tell the stories.

I've always thought of, of a relationship with an actor to an audience as a marriage, you know. And a story, you know. And there are ups and downs, and you work through them, and you work with them.

You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.

As an actor, you know when you've got great material in front of you. When you're working, you think, 'Is this the one? The one that everyone will respond to and be moved by?' You pray that you have told the story well... that your peers will see it and audiences will love it.

The most pivotal moments in people's lives revolve around emotions. Emotions make stories powerful.

'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' by Mitch Albom - I read it in eight hours and blubbed my eyes out when it finished. I've thought about the story every day since.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

Any time you can build jokes around a story that resonates on an emotional level, it is going to have a big impact.

The script for 'Trainspotting' was amazing, and it was different from the book.

Eventually, when I got the 'Meadowland' script, I saw something in it that made me think I could make something special out of it, something that could work with my style. Emotionally, I connected to it. I thought, 'If I feel this way just imagining it, maybe we can make that happen on screen and make people feel something when they watch it.'

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

It's why we're actors: to be able to tell the stories that really matter.

I'm taken by a story and a character. I'll read a script, and if it touches me and moves me and makes waves, that's why I'll choose it.

To tell my story, to touch lives.

I still try to make the "next" book my "best" book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

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.

Are You Seeing Me? is written powerfully with both the heart and the head, and neither gives an inch. It's funny, moving and hugely insightful. Darren Groth puts the reader into the heads of Perry and Justine in a way that feels so true and so revealing that I think I've come away with a greater capacity for empathy. I didn't know a book could do that. We all need to spend some time inside this story.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?