Rebecca Miller Quotes
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I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.
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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.
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As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.
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Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.
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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.
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The quality of life decreases with heightened security.
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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.
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I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person.
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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.
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I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter].
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There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.
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That's one thing I find about having children - it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who've had children.
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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.
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I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!
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Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.
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I was an anorexic, beer drinking, class cutting, doodling, shoplifting, skater chick that was into nature, art class, and the beach.
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Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.
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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.
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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.
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I never had any desire to become a well-known actress.
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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.
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It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.
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I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?
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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.
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One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.
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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.
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I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.
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I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.
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Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.
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Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.
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