“One of the biggest turnoffs is being presented with an idea that’s already, to a degree, complete. That’s not an adventure, and it’s not a learning experience. It’s more of a chore. Then you become a technician with taste, as opposed to an explorer and an author.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what’s being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what’s being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it’s the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“It’s important for an actor to feel like they’re really being watched and to receive feedback and encouragement about the aspects of what they’re doing that feels truthful – and also to raise awareness when they might be resorting to habits and tricks, which every actor has.”
― Bennett Miller
“You make a movie and you’d like it to be appreciated, respected, embraced.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think I am missing a gene that most people have to enable them to feel happiness about success and these kind of things.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think I approach things with an outsider’s perspective.”
― Bennett Miller
“I don’t believe in God in the way I often see described by religion.”
― Bennett Miller
“For me, personally, the value of a film is not determined by a review, but the health of the film is.”
― Bennett Miller
“A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies.”
― Bennett Miller
“It’s great making a film and having it embraced and seen. I really enjoy that.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“Honestly, my smartest business decision was to never do anything that I didn’t love doing.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think the mind has a way of getting to where it needs to get to. If you are persistent.”
― Bennett Miller
“I am attracted to anything that does not feel derivative.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“It couldn’t be more satisfying to work on something almost anonymously for years, then to have it received affectionately with support.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“It’s amazing how much you will forgive if the behavior is truthful.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.”
― Bennett Miller
“The silence of a room when someone enters with a gun is very different from the sound that room makes when empty.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“The one thing I’ll say is I was a quiet kid. Much more of an observer than a performer.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― 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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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.”
― Bennett Miller
“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
“I think when an actor feels like they’re being watched with great sensitivity and a subtle eye and a nose for truthfulness, that has some effect.”
― Bennett Miller
“Every film requires a different process. You learn about these particular actors and the particular chemistry between these actors. Recognizing when you don’t need to shoot a scene because it’s going to be cut anyway.”
― Bennett Miller
“I am attracted to characters who are in worlds where they don’t belong and who have great ambitions that they imagine will somehow reconcile themselves with the world and make things right.”
― Bennett Miller
“When I learned a little bit about du Pont and a little bit about Mark Schultz, I was attracted to the notion that these incredibly different people found each other and seemed, for a moment, to be the answer that each was looking for.”
― Bennett Miller
“I don’t know of a filmmaker who does not feel buoyed and lifted when their peers embrace the work.”
― Bennett Miller
“Making a film is a challenge.”
― Bennett Miller
“It’s hard. It’s hard to get a film made properly.”
― Bennett Miller
“There’s really powerful and potentially dominating forces when you make a film that can harm it if you’re incapable of orchestrating things.”
― Bennett Miller
“Adam Sandler in ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant.”
― Bennett Miller
“Chemistry exists or it doesn’t, and I think casting is a very underappreciated component of filmmaking.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think all good sports movies aren’t really about sports.”
― Bennett Miller
“I’ve never even watched one of my films since they’re completed.”
― Bennett Miller
“I really tried to get comfortable with the notion of shooting digital on ‘Foxcatcher’ and just couldn’t. I shot many tests and experimented with all sorts of techniques to manipulate it into a place that worked for us, but it just didn’t happen.”
― Bennett Miller
“Silence is absorption, and when you’re watching a film and you’re that quiet and you’re that still, at least from my experience of watching films, that indicates an absorption, where you’re really in the moment. You’re really present. What you’re seeing is vital to you in that moment, and it’s tingling, and it’s alive, and it matters.”
― Bennett Miller
“I don’t like sensationalizing events. Instead of making waves, I want to make everything settle, so we can see to the bottom of things.”
― Bennett Miller
“I don’t have many rules, but one of them is, ‘Do not make a movie you yourself would not want to see.’”
― Bennett Miller
“If you have a vision for something, things are navigable. If it gets fuzzy, then obstacles become much more formidable.”
― Bennett Miller
“A lot of the time, excess on a film set is just damaging.”
― Bennett Miller
“I do have that compulsion to organize moments into a larger thing.”
― Bennett Miller
“Filmmaking requires the participation and cooperation of many people. It’s unrealistic to expect that you’re not going to be challenged by unforeseeable forces from every direction.”
― Bennett Miller
“I like to rehearse. We did a lot of rehearsals for ‘Moneyball,’ but it is really individual to the actor. It’s not like, ‘Here is my process, everybody. Fit in.’”
― Bennett Miller
“I am and always have been fascinated with people, and I have a very good time coming up with the narratives of people’s lives, exploring how a person thinks and feels.”
― Bennett Miller
“There is a paradox in politics that what it takes to get elected is not necessarily what it takes to govern, and my feeling is that trying to control things too much feels icky to me.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think it’s fair to ask how truthful a film is as opposed to how factual it is.”
― Bennett Miller
“If something is to be quietly powerful, it requires more balance than a film that allows for more freneticism.”
― Bennett Miller
“I know what it’s like to be genuinely intrigued and compelled by a story and to have a sense that there’s an adventure to be had and a film to be conjured.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think Will Ferrell is probably completely evil, the darkest of them all. He is known among comics as the dark knight. An evil, evil man and a dangerous soul.”
― Bennett Miller
“I’m actually not a big reader.”
― Bennett Miller
“As a filmmaker, one tends to want to evolve evermore towards a place of independence.”
― Bennett Miller
“What I will say – one thing that is attractive about getting a real film made within the studio system is that studio systems, with their marketing and distribution, have real power.”
― Bennett Miller
“Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.”
― Bennett Miller
“If you find yourself considering a project that seems like a layup, then you’re diluted, or that movie’s probably not the right movie for you to be making.”
― Bennett Miller
“You can recognize almost immediately if the film you’re watching is the product of some kind of a hive mind or the result of a personal vision and genuine collaborations. ‘Manchester by the Sea’ reminds us of the potential of the latter and, for that reason, is the kind of work that makes me, as a filmmaker, want to continue. It’s inspiring.”
― Bennett Miller
“Kenny Lonergan, as a filmmaker, doesn’t tell stories so much as he observes them, which is to say, his films don’t come pre-digested. You have to bring your own enzymes. It’s a more gripping and challenging experience.”
― Bennett Miller
“As a filmmaker, you want people to understand and get what you do, and it’s a lot to ask for.”
― Bennett Miller
“If I had a dozen lives, one of them would involve really getting off the rails in India, heavy into meditation.”
― Bennett Miller
“I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.”
― Bennett Miller
“My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena.”
― Bennett Miller
“I’m attracted to stories of people who don’t belong together, who embark on something and find themselves in places they don’t belong.”
― Bennett Miller
“My films are inquiries. I’ve chopped down all the signposts, I really resist taking moral positions.”
― Bennett Miller
“I’m interested in telling stories that add up to more than the entertainment of the story. That’s what does it for me.”
― Bennett Miller
“My entire life can fit into a knapsack.”
― Bennett Miller
“I feel like what I’m after is not easy for me to find, and to want it to be easy… it would be absurd for me to have that ambition.”
― Bennett Miller
“I like to have something that I can challenge common-sense notions about, challenge the apparent truths, and really look past the many faces of a thing to see what’s behind it.”
― Bennett Miller
“I think, when I meet a person, in general, it’s not my habit to conclude anything about people. Not completely. Even people you know well constantly remain open.”
― Bennett Miller
“Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the telling of a good story. But they don’t get in the way of the truth.”
― Bennett Miller
“I am attracted to these outsider characters who just don’t belong anywhere, and who are operating in worlds they sort of don’t fit, coupled with huge ambitions.”
― Bennett Miller
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