Jeff Lemire Quotes

When you make a film that is based in reality, reality will come up all around it.

Scripts are corny and predictable. Real life is always better.

The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time.

I've just always been interested in alter-naturalism and seeing if you can make real life interesting enough to be dramatic without enhancing it. Like, could you make a movie or write a play in which there's no compression of time, there's no enhanced event, it's just real life?

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.

I prefer to write about what we refer to as 'the supernatural' versus everyday life. Humans, by themselves, bore me.

I would only ever be involved in a reality show that was about real life and had lots of action.

I draw inspiration from anything and everybody and that's what country music is to me... real life stories and real life emotions.

I love documentary because it's alive.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

When you make movies based on real life, you try to exaggerate it.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up.

I actually quite love following Lisa Rinna on Twitter, because she tweets like I tweet, which is like, 'Just dropped off the kids!' Or, 'Hey, here's a great sale at the grocery store!' It's such real life, and to me she's like a celebrity - she looks like Hollywood to me - that following her makes me feel like, stars are just like us!

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

It's pretty simple to me: we come from a really grounded world where anything you say could be the thing that the scene becomes about. We're always treating it as if we would treat it in real life. It's all observation.

I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.

I'm following a real event and real people.

In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.

I find that there's so much funny stuff in real life, and I am much more interested in super grounded, real stuff, so now I just want things to feel real and authentic.