Philippe Falardeau Quotes

For me, casting is critical. It's nice that social media and the passionate fans really corroborated choices and embraced kids to be characters.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

Casting is everything. I put a huge amount of work into casting, and consistently across my career, I am most proud of my bold choices I made in casting.

A director should cast a person who fits into their script.

Great actors help. Every project is different. Sometimes it's completely open, and I've been able to cast who I've wanted. And then sometimes people want a certain kind of actor.

It's not a secret, but if you know what the hell you're doing, you pick good actors. And you know what makes a good actor? A good personality in the performer, in the person.

Sometimes casting falls in place easily and sometimes it takes a while. Fifty per cent of my job is done when I get the right actors.

Any script, even like The Founder, if it's something that I imagine myself playing this character or that character - any of the characters, basically - how do we flesh these characters out to be good enough to have amazing actors that come in that make it really difficult for them to say no? Even though I'm not right for any of those parts, that's just kind of how we go about it.

I got called and was told, "We'd like you to do The Hobbit", which was my favorite of all of them when I was a kid - "And we want you to play a character that's not in the books", I gulped and hesitated, but then I went, "These guys know this world, and they represent this world so well, that I actually think they've earned the right to have a little play."

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

I usually make up stories for my kids.I like to tell them stories and make up any kind of crazy to involve them in characters. The kind of fairytales I don't like are the ones with happy endings, where there's just good and evil and things are perfect. I think when there's a good story for children it has a moral tale, so that's what I try to teach my kids.

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy. Within that alternate universe, the characters do have quite a bit of free will. I know it's happening in my mind and my mind alone, but they seem to have their own ability to shape their destinies. So I'm not shooting for anything. If the characters are vulnerable it's simply because they're very human.

I started taping my dad's auditions when I was 11, when he was auditioning actors for one of his movies. I would see, over and over again, that there wasn't just one actor for the role. It was really clear that there were a lot of people who could play a character really well, and it would always come down to something kind of weird and non-obvious as to why a person was cast. If you're not right, you're not right, but that's okay.

I think one of the things when you're casting children is you're also casting their parents.

I watched some of Lost series. And I realized that the character they wanted me to play didn't really come in for a long time. It would have just been the wrong thing for me to do.

I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren't going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.

Casting is everything. Getting the person that you imagined is this character and then seeing what they bring to it.That's why you hire them, so why tell somebody first what it is you want? I'm more curious to see what they bring to it and then be inspired by it and say: "OK, what if you tried this?" or "What would happen if ... ?"

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

It was seriously just a name. They didn’t tell you what to do. They didn’t tell you how they wanted the character to be - nothing. You went in to audition for this character name and that was it. When I started, before I came onto the set, I went to Gene Roddenberry and said: hey, what do you want from this guy? Who is he? And being as smart as he is, he said: don’t listen to what you’ve heard or read or seen in the past, nothing. Just make the character your own. And that’s what I did.

I think auditions are set up for failure because they're not really the set experience. There's no time to develop the character. You're just looking at someone... if someone's really good in an audition, sometimes they're not good in the film. It's something you learn when you're doing short films. It's the same way that some people do well at taking tests and some people don't. But when you're on a long-term filmmaking process it's a completely different feeling.

Maybe I'm perverse, but the question of "rooting" for a character, or setting out to write a character for whom other people will root, has never had anything to do with why I read or write fiction. As long as the writing and story remain alive, intense, invigorating, provoking, the characters can be as demonic or saintly as the author wants.

Even though Doctor Strange is an established character, when you're doing an origin story there's a lot of room for manoeuvre.

Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.

As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author.

The great thing about working on a genre show is that you can basically have a season finale where every character is left destroyed, and then hit the reset button and come back for the next season.