Laurie Metcalf Quotes

People come to the theatre to be excited and uplifted - I want to inspire my audience.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

What's cool is when you're able to give your audience imagination and you don't have to cage them in like animals.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I think when I start out writing, I always try to write the version of the movie that I want to go see. I don't mean it in a way that ignores the audience, but I really set out to make a movie that I want to see and that, hopefully, other people will want to go see it. So whatever's amusing to me, I guess, I throw it all in there.

I love being able to create something from the page and bring it to life.

When I listen to a basic thought, I try to visualise the cinema in it. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes boyish, sometimes amateurish. It is a trial and error method. But the bottom line is that I want to entertain the audience.

I feel very strongly as a writer and as a director it is not my job to crush the audience's imagination.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

To me, the best projects are the ones where you have a pretty good idea of what the spine of it's gonna be, but then all sorts of things happen that you could've never predicted, and those are the magic moments of the films.

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

I try to work on shows that I would want to watch.