Todd Solondz Character Quotations

Some people see me as dissecting my characters in some kind of heartless, coldblooded, analytical way, when in truth making these movies is a passionate, intensely emotional experience for me. I'm detached from the characters only to the degree that I have to be in order to write honestly about them.

There can be a blurry line between laughing at the expense of a character and laughing at the recognition of something painful and true. But blurry as it may be, it is nevertheless unmistakable, and sometimes the laughter I hear makes me wince.

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

This driving need is what is so defining of her and is, in a sense, what makes her a palindrome, ... Loosely, metaphorically speaking, a palindrome describes that part of ourselves that is immutable and that resists, so that for all the metamorphoses, physical and otherwise, that we see over the course of the film, the character remains a constant.