Stephen Daldry Quotes

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

There has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.

The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema.

But I love filmmaking - I'm not ashamed of that. You're sort of vilified if you say that in England.

Dramas for me are where it's at, but a great drama, a great character-driven drama, there's very few of them that get made; there's very few of them that actually make it to theaters. There's just very few of them.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

Hollywood has lost touch with their audience a long time ago.

In Denmark, we're making 20 films a year. If I'm showing up in even two of those, people will get tired of me really fast.

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.

I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.

Movies are just ridiculously expensive.

The reality is that every movie is a new business. Nobody says, 'Hey, let's go down to the Pantages Theater, I hear a Warner Brothers picture is playing there.' Or, 'Let's go to this theater, I hear the film came in on budget.' It'd be ridiculous.

I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.

I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.

I wake up every morning bolt upright, whether it's a commercial, not that that's a good thing or a bad thing, because I shoot commercials in between movies. But whether it's a commercial or a movie where I'm shooting a major train wreck, the thing that worries me most is when I'm doing a performance thing.

We want to make movies for the big screen. We want people to go to the theater and feel like they're watching a movie.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

I was a film editor for eight years before I made my first feature, 'Dog Soldiers.' I am from Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England.

Somebody has to invest in creating the movies of the future.

No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.