Rebecca Miller Quotes

I think it's very important to keep being frightened - if you're not frightening yourself, you should take a break. You need to keep experimenting. You also need to take time - that's how you do good stuff - layering and depth of knowledge.

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self. We learn how to be people from other people. Then you think - what's personal freedom? Is self-creation possible? This book is dedicated to a friend of mine who really did re-create herself. I didn't do that - I stayed in the circus and am a circus performer like my parents were. I did what I was raised to do - I'm glad I did but I'm fascinated by the people who managed to do something else. I was always very curious about other people.

When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!

I never had any desire to become a well-known actress.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.

It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.

In a way, after you're done directing there is a sense of amnesia that washes over you, you can't exactly remember how you did things. It's a zone, just like an athlete, when they can't remember what they did, but somehow got it done.

At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.

The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

I'm really interested in the minutiae of different tones and what that explains - how people's backgrounds are reflected in minute details of how they interact. It's true that I'm hypersensitive to all that. Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another. Because I think if I had to write another novel now I would really not be good in my head anymore. It's too much. The frustration is so intense of knowing that this structure is right around the corner. Writing is a particular kind of frustration.