Bennett Miller Quotes (16 Quotes)

He was my only choice. Danny wrote me this great letter, basically saying, 'What else do we want...other than three old friends making a film together' He's right, and it was a very good script.

The market creates conventionality and conformity, but that's not really what people want to see.

It's very hard now that the film is done and you can look at it to appreciate the magnitude of the risk he took and the possibility of horrible, embarrassing failure. Think about this character. Think about who Capote was. And think about Phil Hoffman, who's basically like a big guy with a baseball cap with a deep voice.

We decided to do something completely different. Writing is the loneliest job in the world. I wanted to capture that solitude. Writers spend a lot of time alone in a room just typing away, and this is the first movie to really show how a writer works.

He works himself into states of crisis and distress, worrying that people are going to know he is a fraud and that his career is over.

He'd done lead in two other movies that didn't ever catch on. I think he wanted to be more involved and help apply some of the lessons that he'd learned.

It feels good. It really does. It feels good because you want the film to have a life. You want it to put its roots down and become a fixture of the culture, and these are indicators that the film will last and that it will reach people and that's what you hope for, so I'm really pleased about it.

He was the only choice. He was going to do it or we weren't going to do it. I've known Phil for 21 years now, and I feel I know him inside and out, and other than him being an incredible actor, a shaman-like actor, I will say that everything in this movie that gets revealed through this character are things that Phil knows.

It's more evidence that it's about the heart of the thing more than the magnitude of it. Not a David and Goliath thing. Small films, big films, it's not the size of the film that matters.

I cry in movies when people do good things.

Unlike most films, it examines a side of a person's life that's hidden, and I think there's a lot of people who carry around a fair amount of darkness and keep it private for a lifetime. The film is about a very public figure and his very private tragedy.

I know literary figures aren't necessarily an easy sell for mainstream audiences. But he represents something bigger than himself. He's an American triumph and tragedy.

Capote was an enormously and dangerously ambitious, talented, conflicted guy who really concealed himself from the public. He was at once a very public figure and a very private figure. And this is a movie that sort of peels back the public mask and gets into the heart of darkness.

It's a tragedy, it's a classic tragedy. In a way, he's got a character flaw that is going to cause his destruction, and it's not going to come from the outside it's going to come from the inside of him.

This isn't really a biography. It's a tragedy.

Philip insisted it would be wrong for him to break down and be so emotional. But, of course, when we rolled camera, he proceeded to do exactly what he'd argued against. It's what makes his performance feel so real. When he entered a scene, he was no longer thinking like an actor. He was thinking like Truman Capote would think.