Doug Liman Quotes

'I Am Number Four' is a great story about a guy who's trying to find his destiny and figure out who he is and his identity.

I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action.

I am a mystery to myself.

I just gravitate to movies where the mystery is the character himself. Any time you see a trailer of something where somebody is questioning 'Who am I?' I'm hooked.

'Solomon Creed' is a man who knows everything about everything but nothing about himself and is on a journey of redemption to try and reclaim his identity.

The thing that I like about action sequences is that if they're done well, you get to know more about the character in those few minutes than you do through 10 minutes of exposition.

The most important thing for me in an action sequence is, you understand the characters' intention and the challenges the characters are going to have to face: what the character story is within the action sequence.

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.

I always find myself gravitating toward stories of transformation, and one of those periods is teenage life. When teenagers are figuring out who they are and have one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood - I think that's a really mythic moment to tell stories about.

'TMOK' is about the very interesting journey of a girl in a different situation, and different stories blend into one film. The film has a lot of emotional depth, and I am sure people will like it.

When you start to realise how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

Blake & Murphy and I used to be best friends. They helped me discover who I am. They taught me that Bliss was good, but bad is better. Because of the boys, I was able to really express who I am instead of being the pixie princess I was pretending to be.

When I was in high school, I tried too hard to be cool and to impress people, but playing all these different characters has helped me find myself again.

There's a lot of ways someone can grow up, but one way is discovering your parents are not all they say they are.

It's hard to know who you are until you're cracked open a little bit.

The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don't know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.

I see a lot of possibilities in the age of my characters - between 18 and 21. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that.

Well, in Angel of Hope, Amber ends up going in her sister's stead. The focus of that book and the next one coming out, Angel of Love, is how she finds her way out of her sister's shadow and into herself. That's really what those two novels are based on.

The script changed so much over seven months and just had loads and loads of re-writes. I tried to tailor things to what I was interested in, like the relationship with the dad changed quite a lot because I thought one of the things when you're a young guy one of your biggest fears is this irrational fear of walking in your dad's footsteps and living the same life as him. I thought, even if your dad's a good guy, you just want to assert your independence on everything and it causes these irrational sort of rages.

The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel blest by everything.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

I am no longer Tris, the selfless, or Tris, the brave. I suppose that now, I must become more than either.

I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.

But I do believe that's when you do your soul-searching. I think when you have these trials that life gives you, it is an opportunity to find out who you are. Not just who you are when everything's great, but who are you when everything is taken away from you and you have nothing.