Guy Ritchie Quotes

If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.

I'm something of a history buff. It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

I will say that adapting a character like Da Vinci really wasn't that dissimilar from doing Batman or Superman. Because all three of these guys are really iconic figures, and yes, Da Vinci was historical, but there's clearly been a lot of mythmaking about him, and a lot of things have been attributed to him that may or may not have happened.

For some reason, I have always had a really good ability to write children in a way that's realistic but not annoying. The key to that is underwriting them: peel back the dialogue and keep it simple.

The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

I was a big fan of the show 'Deadwood' on HBO, which was created by David Milch. And as soon as I heard that all of those characters on Deadwood were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody.

I was trying to do like a spaghetti western but using World War II iconography.

I've always dreamed of doing a period piece, I just never knew what it would be.

To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie.

It's much harder to play myself. If I ever do a movie again, it'll be a singing serial killer.

I think what I find challenging is just trying to bring a truthfulness and a realism to a character.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

I don't think Peg Bundy was very much like Katey Sagal. Definitely the wardrobe Gemma from Sons of Anarchy wears might be a little more like Katey Sagal. I mean, any time you play anything, there's pieces of yourself that you're kind of elaborating on. I mean, you're using parts of yourself.

In 'The Way Back' survivors were all ordinary people, and that's the whole point, that's who I felt these people should be, and they shouldn't be that hero that stands out.

When you think of the former high school football star, you think 6-foot-2, white, meathead as the model for that kind of character. Since I'm not 6-foot-2 or white, I just thought about what I could bring to it. I thought about Smash Williams from 'Friday Night Lights,' like the cocky quarterback, and played around with that.

History is filled with fictional people.

Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That i what caricature is all about

Villains are not fun for me to play, as such. But caricature-ish, intense behaviors that are based on real human traits are interesting. That makes an interesting story.

I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

I like being part of good movies and telling stories that mean something to me. I also like playing characters that I look up to.

I love playing females that are put into these pressure-cooker situations, but they're real. I didn't want to be this kind of Lara Croft superwoman.

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.