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The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

If you create a movie that is only character driven, with a weak plot, then you - as a director, you have to make sure you keep pushing the tempo.

I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.

I've been in showbusiness all my life, but as an actress I have never been overly driven.

The only other things, and again these things are hearsay, is that he could be pretty rough on directors, because he knew exactly the way he wanted to play the part. And he did so.

But I would like to think that it's the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.

There's a lot of directors who were actors, so they have the sensibility of an actor, which sometimes helps.

When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.

Well, I think probably when I first got in the business, I wasn't thinking of being strictly a character actor. But I knew I wanted to be a working actor, and as the years have gone on, I just naturally evolved into that. Because, y'know, I'm not a leading guy. Never was.

I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.