Maurissa Tancharoen Quotes

Casting is a big deal.

You don't try any less hard on the ones that don't. I've gotten lucky to work with some amazingly talented people that have helped the ones that have worked work. I think you just have to keep doing the stories you love and the characters that you love and are drawn to.

I've always believed that it's the film that chooses the actor and not the other way round.

If you can utilize a guy's talents and not let other parts of the game suffer, you've got a winning mix.

When you work with people and are friends with them also, you have more of a shorthand. I think people relax more and it opens the door to being less precious and trying things that, when you're shooting and writing, it becomes much more collaborative - therefore funny, hopefully.

Successful people use their strength by recognizing, developing, and utilizing the talents of others.

I think maybe the most important thing that I or anybody at my company and any of my colleagues can do is establish a trusting, productive, collaborative relationship with creative people.

I always think once you have the lead protagonist, you cast around that character.

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

I think when I'm cast in things, people take that as part of the package that I would like to have some sort of creative control and they know what I'm capable of, so they let me come on the day with my own ammunition.

I think in most cases, if you're with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That's how I can tell if it's a good collaboration: If it's faster than me by myself, then it works. If it's slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.

All my roles are character roles. On the other hand, there are those people who have an inner...I think we all do the same thing. You can't get by on aura alone. That I know. Everyone has to dig in. Everyone has to do the same set of, "What is this about? What is this character doing?" Everybody from Spencer Tracy to Brad Pitt to Jeffrey Tambor.

I think that there's a natural attraction to enigmatic characters, people that have decided to make a decision in their lives to live differently than everyone else. That's a very attractive quality that also happens to be good for filmmaking, people that have their own point of view and aren't looking at things the same way as everyone else.

I loved making The Imitation Game and it's really gratifying to hear the audience's response to the character that I play. It was just a little thing that I did because I really liked the film and I liked Benedict [Cumberbatch] and I loved Morten's [director Morten Tyldum] previous film, Headhunters. For me, it was something I did thinking, "Wow, this is a lovely quality piece of work."

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.

I don't really care if people like a character ornot; I think in life we don't always like everybody. But you haveto be able to understand them.

I'm more interested in talking about what I do. And I don't think people are interested in my personal life. I've never had a Hollywood life. I've always been a worker. But it's true: If you know something about a person outside of the movie that is really repulsive to you, it's hard to shake. So I prefer to do my speaking through the work. I don't want people to know anything about me, because that's not important. I'm more interested in the me that takes shape through these characters. The other stuff is personal and too easy to trivialize out of context.

When I think about my Glamazon, would that character get down if someone said her thighs were heavy? No, she knows what other people think is none of her damn business.

I think auditions are set up for failure because they're not really the set experience. There's no time to develop the character. You're just looking at someone... if someone's really good in an audition, sometimes they're not good in the film. It's something you learn when you're doing short films. It's the same way that some people do well at taking tests and some people don't. But when you're on a long-term filmmaking process it's a completely different feeling.

One of the things that I learned in television, and one of the beauties of television, is that, if you have a strong writing staff, they rely on you just as much as you rely on them. They look to me or the other actors to help inspire them to take the character in interesting directions.

I love watching a movie that is smart, that makes me think, that includes me as an audience member, and I especially love it when I know that the people that I'm working with also do that.

I'm always surrounded by smart talented people. I had talented partners. Stan Latham for one. Talent scouts.