Quotes About Interpretation

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

I have had to make a decision I may not agree with, but I am required to follow the letter of the law. It is not my job to think what is best... My responsibility is to decide what the law says and to decide to the law.

When something is written for you or handed to you, sometimes there's a very interesting dance as you discover what it is that's required.

Plenty of gun opponents have pointed out the obvious: that the Founding Fathers could never have envisioned the kinds of 'arms' that exist today - Washington, Jefferson, and the rest had never even seen a bullet. Musket balls for guns that required constant reloading were the 'arms' of the day.

Dubbing is an important part of acting, and I feel complete only when it's my voice that is heard. Having essayed the character, I know the kinds of emotions that are required for each scene.

A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.

When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

I'm such a carnivorous researcher as an actor - I chew it up like it's meat, and I really don't know how to do that without the people that are producing or creating or writing that which they want me to chew up.

When you're researching something for a movie, you get a very different kind of reaction than when you're researching something for an article for 'The New York Times.'

The internet thing is what I have the greatest problem with. I don't know if anyone in the media gets the internet thing and Harvey Norman. I think they have some strange interpretation of it that bears no resemblance to what actually happens.

If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.

People resent movies that try to tell them exactly what to feel.

My aim is to be as open and as incomprehensible as possible. There has to be a perfect balance between open and shut.

The world intrudes in my brain daily. Since my brain is dripping with all kinds of stuff that's out there in the world, that I can't seem to be able to shut out, it has to end up being in my work as well.

I am shy. People misconstrue it as arrogance.

Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick, or is about to be.

Election losses are always an inkblot test for partisans. If a candidate's defeat has no clear and obvious cause, if the data points are all over the map, it is easy for those on the sidelines to claim, 'Candidate X would have won if only he or she had been more like... me.'

There are two sides to every question.

Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.

In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.