Brandon Routh Quotes

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

Well, obviously I was excited by the idea that Woody Allen was going to direct it. But at the same time, the script itself and the character was really interesting.

I'll continue making films because I love being able to drop into other people's worlds. My goal is to be constantly learning.

I try to make films that I find exciting. It makes me want to get out of bed at five in the morning, have my make-up done and play for the rest of the day.

I started watching movies my grandpa did, and I saw what an impact they made on the world. That's when I said, 'Hey, I want to do that too.'

I would love to do films, but the script has to excite me.

I like to make films about my heroes.

I spoke to my father about making a documentary on him. I have been seriously contemplating that.

I get very excited when I have to work in a film and when I am narrated.

All the excitement is during the making of a film. Once I'm done with it, I switch to my next project and am excited about that.

My first camera job was filming workplace safety videos, which involved months of watching and videotaping people doing their jobs. I was hooked - from there, I wanted to know where they lived and the rest of their habits and desires.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes. When you put a sound to something and it's wrong, it's so obvious. When it's right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's a magical thing that can happen in cinema.

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.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

I guess it's easier to get things made when you know the story you want to tell, you know the characters you want to play, and you know the filmmakers you want to tell them with.

I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

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.