Quotes from Tom McCarthy

There's a bit more of a safe distance when you're making a narrative movie, a bit more perspective. Audiences can separate themselves from the harsh reality of the facts a little bit more and think: 'Okay, how do I consider this?'

With docs, there's often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open.

Taking chances is my job; some will connect and some won't, and certain films find their audiences in different ways. I think 'Spotlight' probably is a better movie because of 'The Cobbler.' You learn with every movie you make: you learn from your mistakes, and you learn from your achievements, and I really do have that approach to filmmaking.

I'm a pretty well-read person. I read my paper every morning.

I think when you're dealing with faith, you want to be as responsible and sensitive to the material as you can.

I loved acting, and then acting led to writing, and writing led to directing, and directing lead to five movies, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

I just try to keep going and work on projects that are exciting to me, with people I respect and enjoy and want to work with. That takes me in different directions sometimes, but it's all been a pretty good ride.

A lot of times, I'll resist the temptation to visually define a movie until, one, I really understand just what the movie's about, and two, until I start talking to my cinematographer.

Ultimately, as an actor, it comes down to committing to the text in the script.

It was such a joy to be an actor on 'The Wire.'

Some people shy around 'The Cobbler.' 'The Cobbler' will always be a very special film to me. I've had a lot of wonderful response from 'The Cobbler.'

Whenever you're telling a story about true-life events and about real people, there's a tremendous responsibility-slash-burden to get it right.

The passion and knowledge of journalism as storytelling is incredibly infectious.

You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain's factory that he's just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion's taking place already—it's always been taking place. You just didn't notice Ã¢â'¬Â¦

The choir are screaming now, fugue-permutations veering and careening to the outer limits of the field where any ratio of intervals or pitches might hold sway: tonics swapping with subdominants within the space of single notes that seem to play out in three octaves all at once, false entries, inversions, retrogrades and diminutions running riot through all keys -- until, suddenly, these fall away, like clouds

To the anthropologist, there's no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon – only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.

We're the noblest savages of all.

And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains.

Literature has to remain frustrating — to withhold something, remain incomplete — or it's not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That's literature's USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time.

All great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.

If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we'd live in a dull world.

People need foundation myths.

to be real--to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate.

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.