John Grierson Quotes

It's all about the script. Reality is key to me and less cutesy.

I'm a big fan of not letting the audience of off the hook, as they say. I like it when things feel real, and that's oftentimes not comfortable.

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.

I don't believe that you can give the same performance every take. It's physically impossible, so why bother? If you don't do what is happening at that moment, then it's not real. Then you're holding something back.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all.

I love acting. I just love it. It's in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. Jimmy said to him, "If you've got to cry in a scene, you've got to cry. Make it real." And that's all that I believe in.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy - you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it's not real.

Everything I have now is so real, so vivid.

They say real girls aint never perfect, perfect girls aint real.

I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.

Personally, I just want to work on stuff that challenges me, that excites me, and that I think is original. You want to do something that does to other people what films do to you. It's the most wonderful thing in the world when you can lose yourself from reality and go into a story, and believe it and go on that journey with people, and you have to work that will somehow do that. It won't always, but hopefully sometimes.

By putting myself out there the way I've been doing people see me as a real person. Even though I do character voices and funny noises the stories are still real and I put them all out there.

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being real with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you.

I am a director and I think actually they're not that different - dramas and docs aren't that different. When I'm doing a drama I'm trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The hair, the make-up, the costume, the design, you're trying to make it authentic. And when you've got a documentary it's all authentic, so what story are you going to tell and how do you make it dramatic and exciting? It's the same thing.

You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

In anything really, it's finding the reality. You can't be 'real,' but you can create a reality. And that created reality is what the audience believes in. And that's essential. Because if the audience doesn't believe that, they're never going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, you can't lead them up the mountain.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’