Character-Driven Movies Quotes

I've never really been a fan of violence. I'm more into the characters and their journey and those kinds of movies don't really allow for that. It's a different focus.

Those are the movies that we [with Evan Goldberg] always wanted to make. Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, the kind of movies where violence and comedy and characters kind of work together really well.

It is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. […] There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences…there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.

I do sort of gravitate towards smaller, indie-type movies.

I rarely see one of the 'summer blockbuster' movies. I'd like to see a stronger focus on smaller, smarter movies.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

The best of all kinds of movies are character-driven, and I definitely don't want to lose sight of why Derek and I started to write movies together in the first place.

I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.

Sidney Lumet is one of my favorite filmmakers. I feel like his approach to filmmaking was always so human. He was always making movies about the people. He wasn't about the tricks, you know what I mean? From 12 Angry Men on. Another film of his which I really, really love is Prince of the City, with Treat Williams, which is kind of a lost classic. Lumet is one of those film heroes that changed movies for everyone.

I like smaller films better. I don't know why. I think it's the intimacy and there's not this avalanche. It is an avalanche, but it's really myopic. It's really small.