Daniel Clowes Quotes

I just always look for stuff that has a character-driven thing.

I'm often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don't think I've actually cried watching myself.

The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

Breathing is always key in any character. When you have a character with no voice, that makes it even more important.

When I saw 'Talk to Her' for the first time, I was crying out loud because I couldn't imagine that I was doing that film.

I am trying to do films that stay with me for some time. 'Banaras' stays with me.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

'Phase' is a special song to me, and I wanted the video to make you feel like you are on a journey with me. My team and I shot this video three different times, and every time I got it back, I wanted to go a step further.

You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

I really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.

It's one of the things that weirdly I always used to like about my job: that expressing the emotions of a writer or someone creative and breathing empathy and life into a character people can then identify with, that they'd feel less alone.

I'm a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows.

There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.

I don't have very complete scripts for my films. I have a general outline and a character in my mind, and I make no notes until I find the character who's in my mind in reality.

The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

Cry Baby is just a character in this world that I'm trying to create, and the music videos are really important to me, and I've fought to obviously get all of them approved.

I'm not method or anything like that, but sometimes you get the scenes and you're like 'Really, Damon [Lindelof]? More of this? Can I have one scene where it's a walk in the park?' But he doesn't do that. He puts every character through their paces.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is.

For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.

As an actor playing a character, you look for all of those avenues to see if there's any sense of vulnerability or love that you can bring to a character, and decide how that's portrayed and how that's going to be a struggle with the other characters. It's your job to take that on and challenge yourself, and meet that head on and see what happens with it.