Richard LaGravenese Quotes

. . . 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.

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

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

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. My mother always said, "If you don't fight, you can't have a marriage. You have to fight for each other. If you don't know how to fight, relationships tend not to last."

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

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

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.

What I do usually is read the book first, for pleasure, to see if my brain starts connecting with it, as a movie. And then, if I say yes, I read it again, only this time I take a pen and, inside the book, I say, "Okay, this is a scene. I don't need this. I'm going to try this. I'm not going to take this." And then, I use that book like a bible and each chapter heading, I write a menu of what's in that chapter, in case I ever need to reference it. And then, I start to outline and write it. I get in there and it starts to evolve, based on having re-read it again.

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.

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.

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.