Michael Foreman Quotes

Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers,' which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

If I have anything to offer as an actor, it's only my ability to make the person real.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got.

The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.

I am a perfectly normal woman. If what we do is storytelling and represent people that we see all day and every day, well, we do not see supermodels all day and every day.

You can't just keep telling a story the same way over and over again. And I think it only helps the world to be more honest with young kids, to show them the world that they go walk outside and see.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

In the end, it's about the reality. You want something that's believable in the performances; you want something that's believable in the storytelling, in the writing. You just want to connect to something that you feel is real.

I like to believe that my actors are not acting. That whatever they are doing, or whatever has been said, would happen in real life.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

I prize something that feels authentic. It's an undefinable thing, but I know it when I see it, and I think audiences do, too. One of the reasons why 'Bloody Sunday' and 'United 93' work is because they felt real, felt truthful.

When I saw 'Louie' and 'Girls', I was blown out of the water. They were fearless portrayals of real life. Everyone has a different experience.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

My approach is always the same. I try to be as honest as possible. Find the real honesty and humanity in the character because even a fictional character is supposed to feel real. And my job is to find that reality and bring it to the screen.

I always want to tell the truth. It doesn't have to be a pretty truth, and it doesn't have to be a life-changing and life-threatening truth like 'Chi-Raq.' But I want to tell someone's truth in an effort to inspire people to see themselves reflected on the screen.

Anything in which you're playing someone real does make you feel responsible for making the story as true as it can be.