Joan Allen Quotes

In any film there's always a historical implication.

When you look at a film like 'The Ides of March' or 'Good Night, and Good Luck' even, those are really contained pictures.

As an actor, you have to understand how you are seen and then play with that. Otherwise, my looks are not important.

I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.

There was a time when villains were stylized as very fashionable with gelled hair, girls in arms and cigar in mouth but now films have come closer to the reality. Realism has entered our industry.

I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film.

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end.

I love 'Shattered Glass.' It's one of my favorite movies. I think it's just brilliant.

It is quite widely known that I like shoes. This is not something that defines me as either a woman or a politician, but it has come to define me in the eyes of the newspapers. I wore a pair of leopard-print kitten heels to a Conservative Party Conference a few years ago and the papers have continued to focus on my feet ever since.

Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.

One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

I guess a lot of people don't realise, but I'm always playing a character when I'm working. When you're always having people's images projected on you, who 'Daria' is as a person sort of disappears.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

The whole 'enigmatic artist' thing, I just ran with it.

I don't know, a lot of people go crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I don't like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like 'The Wire.' It's more about the state of things; it's not about the narrative of a person.

I think 'NH10' could have been done equally well by anybody else, and it's not a 'female-centric' or 'male-centric' film. It's the story that will appeal to the audience.

There's almost a Rorschach-test quality about writing about 'Playboy'. What comes out in the press is not so much about me as it is about society.

The mini-series 'The Bronx is Burning' thoroughly embarrassed me the way the story was told.