Michael Stuhlbarg Quotes

I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

It's once I discover the people inside that the story really gets going, and then the formal invention becomes less important. It's just the way in; it's the door; and then what's behind it is always some kind of people, which I think probably makes me more in the tradition of realistic fiction because that's usually what I'm interested in, the people.

There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

I've always been interested in character-driven pieces, and my approach to directing is through acting.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.

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

The movie business is not something that can come from the brain. It really comes from the soul and the heart.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

There are always great deals of humanity in the characters that have been offered to me.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.

Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.

Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.

For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.

What drew me into making movies is trying to make characters that step off the screen.