Dustin Lance Black Quotes

We're interested in complex characters and he's a complex character, [J. Edgar] Hoover. I like these types of dramas. I've made a few of them and I'm also interested in power structures so it just has elements that fascinate me, and the more you learn about Hoover, the more polarizing you realize he is.

If you're a history buff, you know about J. Edgar Hoover. He was likely the most powerful man in the US. If you start reading about him, the books contradict each other constantly. I was often left with very little sense of the man personally. I had a sense of what he did and didn't do and what people disagreed about whether he did this or didn't do this or that, but I was like, "Why? Why was he doing all of this?" That was my big question.

Complex man that he was, J. Edgar Hoover left nothing to chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building what became known as the world's greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office.

[ J. Edgar]Hoover, I'm sure, felt that he was right in everything he did and even the things that we don't like about his character.

It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me. I think that finding a character, relating to her and making her as real as possible means forgetting all of that stuff and just trying to find the truth, in that particular character's words.

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

I do not hold that because the author did a bad job of writing the player need trump it with the same kind of acting. When I go into a picture I have only one character to look after. If the author didn't do him justice, I try to add whatever the creator of the part overlooked.

I know it's boring to say this but I always start with the script. I mean if it's well written and it's a character that I haven't necessarily played before.

A lot of films that have been adapted from books stop serving you because they become different. I mean, they are different entities in themselves, but artistically, what you're trying to achieve with a film is so very different to what you're trying to achieve with a book, and the way when you write a script is so very different on paper to how it seems on a screen.

I'm hesitant to do leading man character roles because I think they can be a little boring in terms of needing to be the everyman who navigates the amazing stuff around them.

As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.

I love playing real people. It's a huge challenge and responsibility which I take on board and which I relish. It also scares me to death. Give me a totally fictional character and I don't have the same sort of responsibility. If, though, I play Sigmund Freud or Robert Maxwell or whoever then there is a responsibility.

Whoever would understand the character of Washington, in all its compass and grandeur, must learn it from his own writings, and from a complete history of his country during the long period in which he was the most prominent actor.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

We actually did a lot of takes on this movie [J. Edgar Hoover]. I never left the set wanting more. That's for sure. I don't know. This was a very difficult character for me and a lot of the other actors here, and at times we went and did 8 or 9 or 10 takes on a single day.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can't create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way.

I like playing interesting people, I like playing slightly twisted people. I like playing people who have large appetites who are kind of a bit larger than life.

I write for fanboy moments. I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. I write to do all the things the viewers want too. So the intensity of the fan response is enormously gratifying. It means I hit a nerve.

It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.

If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.