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.
Richard LaGravenese
The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.
The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?
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.
Academy Awards don't really solve anything.
'Thelma & Louise' really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie.
In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.
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.
I'm a dramatist.
I tend to believe, when you're in a relationship, if you don't fight, it's not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don't believe it.
I've always shot on film, but the times are changing.
When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.
I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men.
Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film.
If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.
I think musical theater fans - obsessive fans - are very much like Comic Con fans in our personalities. We're very possessive, and we're very obsessive, and we're very critical. So don't screw with our stuff.
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.
I really like Rosamund Pike very much.
'The Last Five Years' was a musical in 2002, and it's a deconstruction of a marriage.
I'm very much interested in doing actual theater.
My true nature, I believe, is writing.
I had to audition as an actor, and I got so tired of doing the same monologues over and over, so I started writing my own, and then I started selling them to other actors.
Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.
There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.
The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.
Every marriage is weird! That's what it is - we just all need to start embracing the fact that there is no normal.
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.
The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there's a man she's been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, 'What is he doing?' She says you don't sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her.
It's not uncommon to have chaotic writers' rooms.
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!
I don't want to be a writer where all the characters sound the same. There's a facility in that kind of writing.
The South is like a foreign country to me!
How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who walk free. Many find a religious or spiritual stronghold.
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.
I didn't write to become a director, which many people do.
I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.
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.
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.
My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week.
Even as a kid, I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn.
Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like 'Ball of Fire' and 'Double Indemnity.' I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.
Families always have these unspoken dramas, and at holidays, everyone is supposed to sit down and pretend that none of that is going on.
Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.
I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.
