Nicholas Stoller Quotes

All you can hope for when you get a book adapted for TV is that you get a good actor and not some muppet off 'EastEnders.'

I love thinking of movie stars who could play the characters in the books I write. I think Charlize Theron would make a lovely Marie Antoinette.

I think the reason you use an actor is if they are right for the role. Most of the high-profile stars tend to be good actors. That's probably what led to their fame. So if they are right for the movie, you can certainly use them. But I don't want to, not at all. Stardom and Hollywood overpower the ideas and the film.

With movies, they have a certain person or style that they're looking for. It's not that they don't like you, but maybe you're not the person that's right for their movie. That happens a lot.

Casting is storytelling.

I've had a couple opportunities where I've been on the other side of the audition process as a director, so it's really reassuring to me that it's just about who is right for that role and less about if you ace the audition. It's just about getting to know people, not about who's a better actor a lot of the time.

My agents usually get a breakdown of all the projects that are out there. When I got 'Divergent,' they hadn't finished the script. They knew they wanted the leader of the Dauntless to have a certain demeanor and energy. They had me read a short monologue, and I got the part.

I know when an actor goes in to audition, if they don't get the part, it's not because they're a bad actor at all; it's because it's not quite the right fit.

I would remake 'Club Paradise.' I thought the story was cool, the setting was great. Everything lined up, except I wrote it for Bill Murray and John Cleese.

I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.

There's plenty of examples of films where they're greenlit to move forward, and they want to get X actor. And they don't get X actor, so they go with Y, and it doesn't turn out to be as good of a movie as it should have been.

I usually try not to think about actors while writing, because the odds of those stars aligning and you getting those specific people are so rare.

I think the writing and the casting and all of that has so much to do with actors becoming their characters. I think if an actor is right for a role, casting sees that and the words that are on the page, depending on how it's written, can really help your character develop.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

I've never, ever, in my entire life, been upset at a casting choice.

I had the idea that the film would be much better served by a Branch Rickey lookalike than a Harrison Ford lookalike. I didn't want the audience to go into the film thinking that they knew me from some previous experience in a movie.

You know, an audition usually is you come in and read the scene and if you're lucky, you get to read it twice.

[Tony Richardson ] just liked me, knew I was going to be what he wanted [in The Hotel New Hampshire], and that was the end of it. It was unbelievable.

I started taping my dad's auditions when I was 11, when he was auditioning actors for one of his movies. I would see, over and over again, that there wasn't just one actor for the role. It was really clear that there were a lot of people who could play a character really well, and it would always come down to something kind of weird and non-obvious as to why a person was cast. If you're not right, you're not right, but that's okay.

As far as Ken Kwapis saying all those things, I think he just really wanted me in the movie so he probably told Warner Brothers, 'Don't worry, Jimmy Stewart? Gary Cooper? Who else do you like?' If they'd said they were huge Chris Farley fans, he's like, 'He can do that, too. He's a huge physical comedian.' But no, that's really nice to hear.

Once you start working with a particular actor, that actor becomes very present in your mind as your mind as you're writing subsequent episodes.

You really get a feeling, when you're reading scripts, pretty quickly. Within 20 or 25 pages, you can get a sense of the part. I always think about whether I'm right for it and whether I can do it. If I don't think I'm right for it, it should go to somebody else.

The creative part, with the writing of it and the vision, and finding the voice of a show and the characters, is much harder to teach somebody. It's like music. You can either play it or you can't. If you can't play music and you really struggle and work hard, you can learn, but you have to have some inner gift to take it to the next level.

I was very excited to hone in on John Goodman. Casting John first really set the tone. He's very good at being terrifying and being hilarious, and I loved the idea of that character not being merely 'moustache-twirly'. I enjoyed being scared by him.

To make a long story short, I auditioned for the role of Piper because I read the pilots every year and this show was head-and-shoulders above any pilot I've read in awhile. It was amazing. So, I read for Piper and I knew that I wasn't really right for it, but I loved it so much that I wanted to read for it.