Bennett Miller Quotations

I am attracted to anything that does not feel derivative.

I think I am missing a gene that most people have to enable them to feel happiness about success and these kind of things.

Honestly, my smartest business decision was to never do anything that I didn't love doing.

I think the mind has a way of getting to where it needs to get to. If you are persistent.

Every relationship probably has, at its inception, a hundred things that you could pick on and divert you from it, but the feeling is there. You figure out a way to make it work.

I want to work with performers who really are ready to lose their minds, you know? People who are established and have talent, but who are ready to break new ground and really be cracked open in a new way.

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

I think I approach things with an outsider's perspective.

For me, personally, the value of a film is not determined by a review, but the health of the film is.

It's great making a film and having it embraced and seen. I really enjoy that.

I don't believe in God in the way I often see described by religion.

You make a movie and you'd like it to be appreciated, respected, embraced.

My business life is really simple. It's like, get check. Put check in bank. Pay rent. I've never bought a stock in my life. I never got caught up in that trip. And the truth is, I don't obsess about money ever.

People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies.

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.

Phil was able to ... take the physicality of the character and really ingest it and own it completely so that he could really get to the core of this guy and play the complexities.

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.

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.

Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself. I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary.

(Capote) got everything he wanted. He got absolutely everything he wanted, and in so doing, he destroyed himself.

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 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.

He was the only choice. He was going to do it or we weren't going to do it.

He can't put on a uniform and go to work. He cannot be conventional. But you can see in the movie -- he has a very positive and optimistic attitude, though there is evident frustration and anger.

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.

I think the film aspires to do what is often the domain of a novel, which is to express something that is not explicit in life. It's about someone who wants something so bad that he's insensitive to what he's trampling on.

On the surface it's this elaborate story of a writer doing all sorts of things to complete his masterpiece. But nobody, and to some degree not even he himself, really understands the course he's on and what he is going through. He wanted fame so badly he was oblivious to what he was trampling on to get it.

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.

We couldn't have gotten it made without his involvement, without his showing up and saying he believed in us.

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.

It was the perfect gift for Perry, who saw himself, like Thoreau, as an outsider persecuted by society. It made him feel good about himself, which is just what Capote wanted.

I wanted everything to be a stark look. I don't know how many actors would agree to do a film without makeup. Philip loved the idea.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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