Mark Ruffalo is Mark Ruffalo - no explanation needed. He has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met, and he's sort of the Dave Schultz of the entertainment industry.
— Bennett Miller
It's about creating an atmosphere so that characters can just live in front of the cameras. And to be sensitive, and for the actor to know the sensitivity that they are being observed with.
I am nostalgic for those man-behind-the-curtain days when someone could get away with impersonating Kubrick because nobody had any idea what Kubrick looked like.
Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself. I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary.
It's amazing how much you will forgive if the behavior is truthful.
The version of 'Moneyball' I pitched - and we made - is about a guy, Billy Beane, who thinks he's trying to win baseball games. But it's deeper than that.
It couldn't be more satisfying to work on something almost anonymously for years, then to have it received affectionately with support.
If you talk to anybody, among the first things you'll hear is, 'Steve Carell is the nicest guy in the world.' And he is. 'Steve Carell is the greatest guy to work with.' And he is. But all of that belies other aspects that are as true with him.
You can write ten versions of a scene, and then, on the day, discover that something in the original scene worked. It's hard on writers. Hard on actors, hard on editors, hard on me, hard on the producers, who require patience and confidence. But I can't get to the end without going through this process.
I think the mind has a way of getting to where it needs to get to. If you are persistent.
Every relationship probably has, at its inception, a hundred things that you could pick on and divert you from it, but the feeling is there. You figure out a way to make it work.
I want to work with performers who really are ready to lose their minds, you know? People who are established and have talent, but who are ready to break new ground and really be cracked open in a new way.
I don't believe in God in the way I often see described by religion.
You make a movie and you'd like it to be appreciated, respected, embraced.
There is a very uneasy relationship between money and creativity, between money and almost everything. Its tendency to control and corrupt - whether it's in arts or education or politics, hardly anything is untouched by it. Journalism certainly is up there. Everything is susceptible to it.
As a filmmaker, you're looking to reveal something. When other people relate to it, it makes an otherwise lonely world a little less lonely.
The silence of a room when someone enters with a gun is very different from the sound that room makes when empty.
I think baseball represents something closer to our experience. There's no clock in baseball; it's not over until it's over. It's like life in that there are prolonged periods of boredom and monotony, punctuated by intense moments of excitement and sometimes terror.
There's always something happening in pretty much every moment of every scene of everything I've ever worked on in longform that's not being expressed or acknowledged.
People without fathers tend to have two predominant characteristics. They tend to believe anything is possible. At the same time there's an anxiety and an unending insecurity. It's a very American thing because back in the past, we lost our fathers or father. The king.
I think in terms of content and subjects and whatever kind of production it dictates. Can I conceive of an idea that would really connect with my personal rhythms and cost a lot of money? I don't gravitate in that direction, but it is possible.
I like going into a scene knowing that the script isn't quite finished, that there's something that isn't really going to reveal itself until something spontaneously occurs.
I am a tumbleweed. I don't have a company. I don't have a staff. I don't own anything - I've never owned a car or an apartment.
My business life is really simple. It's like, get check. Put check in bank. Pay rent. I've never bought a stock in my life. I never got caught up in that trip. And the truth is, I don't obsess about money ever.
It's great making a film and having it embraced and seen. I really enjoy that.
A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.
I think I approach things with an outsider's perspective.
I'm not going to take something based on budget and do something just for the sake of it. I want to make good films.
The one thing I'll say is I was a quiet kid. Much more of an observer than a performer.
Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.
I like to rehearse to the point we're in the ballpark, and expect that we're only going to get one proper take, more or less.
I definitely have moments in my life where I discovered a film, and the language of the film itself spoke to me in a way, as if someone came up to you and started speaking a language you'd never heard but understood and was able to express things the language you knew could not.
I don't want to sound too spiritual, but when you are true to yourself and follow through with things that connect with you meaningfully, somehow things fall into place.
Before I find myself in the middle of a project, I want to make sure it is the kind of thing that keeps me excited for two years. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to push the proverbial rock up the proverbial mountain.
I have a tremendous amount of patience and tolerance when working with people, but if I ever feel the impulse to inhibit myself from doing one more take, or feel a need to apologize to someone for pushing, I know that that relationship isn't gonna last.
I am attracted to anything that does not feel derivative.
Honestly, my smartest business decision was to never do anything that I didn't love doing.
People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies.
For me, personally, the value of a film is not determined by a review, but the health of the film is.
I think I am missing a gene that most people have to enable them to feel happiness about success and these kind of things.
