Bennett Miller Quotes

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

I would do 'American Splendor' and 'About Schmidt' again in a heartbeat.

I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.

O'Neill presents a very complex multi-layered kind of challenge. His characters are always deeply complex and, to a great extent, inaccessible.

The core to what makes Fincher really interesting - all the technique and all that, that is not in the center even if it's a big big part - what is in the center is the characters, and he really is interested in that.

How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him.

I was quite solitary for 'Hitman.' I was quite apart. He struck me as a very sad individual. There was a mournful quality there.

'Transparent' was huge for me when I first saw it. I felt that, from an authorial point of view, no one was trying to sell characters to us, you know? It's the idea of not having to adore these characters and want to cuddle them; you just have to be into them and their psychology and be compelled by them.

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.

The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it.

Readers seem to really like the fact that what I'm writing is not traditional fantasy.

Nobody can ever describe how much you explore a character on a Peter Berg movie until you're doing it.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

My character in 'La Haine,' he's not bad; he's unhappy, and usually, people are like that. Most of us are angry.

By the time I got to 'Silence of the Lambs,' I was madly in love with close-ups because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of 'Silence of the Lambs' is the story about two people fighting their way into each other's heads.

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.

What was so brilliant about 'Girls' was that they allowed their characters to be ludicrous and selfish and faulted but didn't shy away from a deeper psychological foundation for that neuroses.

Sylvia Plath wasn't scared of exploring the darker side of her psyche.

I think I like reluctant protagonists.

For me, as an actor, the challenge is mostly before the film starts when you have to get into the psychology of the character.

Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

What I really wanted to do was take this character and go beneath the veneer of Lucifer. Underneath it all, there was a guy who was a hurt soul and rejected from his father. How that played upon his choices was kind of interesting, but also it's going inside a shell of someone who doesn't know what an emotion is.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

'Pumped Up Kicks' is written from the perspective like Truman Capote wrote 'In Cold Blood' or Dostoevsky wrote 'Crime & Punishment.' It's psychologically breaking down someone's state of mind and diving in and walking in their shoes.