Sarah Polley Quotes

I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

I don't want to make any general statements, but I feel like so many stories that are presented as being about humanity and human emotion are just so convoluted and overly dramatic and focus on these certain little things that are supposedly meaningful, but just don't really mean anything.

If I had to say the secret recipe for acting melodrama, I think it comes from myself in real life. I have a belief that when I do melo scenes, I try to make them less cheesy.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

Sometimes you have to think about what you're going to say, in real life, so when you see that thought process going on in a movie, it feels real and looks real.

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.

...uncorny, human sized drama

People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building.

I don't watch like Sci-fi or things like that, I'm always more like real life is so endlessly fascinating to me.

Life is so interesting... just every day life. I remember someone once saying: "Drama is real life with the boring bits taken out."

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that's what's extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There's nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I'll give you half an hour of drama.

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

I find it easier to cry than I do to laugh convincingly. It's incredibly hard to pull off a laugh that feels natural take after take after take, that feels real. You can tell a fake laugh the minute you hear it, and that's something I really struggle with more than producing tears.

As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important. However, you have to go by the script because it's related to production, otherwise you will not finish your project. My background are acting, film production, directing, and I studied them for many years. Keep in mind that you need many other skills when you are starting any film project related to real life.

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.