Gavin Hood Quotes

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

In real life, I don't think anybody is all one shade. People who are perceived to be really good have bad thoughts and inclinations that they sometimes act on, I'm sure, and people have different sides to themselves.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.

I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

Nobody is all good or all bad.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

There is no possible source of evil except good.

If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I'll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don't believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.

I don't believe in bad and good, I believe we are all a mix of both.

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.

No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.