Richard LaGravenese Quotes

A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.

Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film.

I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men.

Paul Hicks is the only guy The Beatles will allow to arrange, mix and engineer their music, so he did the Cirque du Soleil 'Love' show.

My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week.

I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.

I've been a teenager. I even feel like I've been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

'The Last Five Years' was a musical in 2002, and it's a deconstruction of a marriage.

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

I've always shot on film, but the times are changing.

You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus.

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

I'm a dramatist.

'Thelma & Louise' really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie.

Nowadays, Skype is a generational way of putting both people on camera at the same time.

I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like 'Ball of Fire' and 'Double Indemnity.' I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.

I really like Rosamund Pike very much.

We have people in our lives who help us evolve along the way. If you're lucky, you find someone who evolves along with you, and that's what you call a long-term relationship.

If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.

The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Even as a kid, I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn.

I felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience ... To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.

As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances.

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film ... at least in Hollywood studio films.