Social Realism Quotes

I am a social realist writer.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

Jimmy McGovern - I love his writing, and I'm a big fan of him and Alan Clarke.

I'd love to find a really good Brazilian project, an up and coming director or something. I wouldn't want to do the typical favela story, Brazilian cinema has a lot more to offer than just that.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

When my first film 'The Seventh Continent' was presented here 12 years ago, non-Austrian spectators would come up to me and say, 'Is Austria that terrible?', whereas for me it wasn't about Austria but about highly industrialised cultures everywhere.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

When I was making 'Satya', many people said that nobody would like to watch such dirty people. But, when the film worked, the same people said it was so real that they could actually smell it!

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live.

I want you to know who I am: what the streets taste like, feel like, smell like. What the cops talk like, walk like, think like. What crackheads do - I wanted you to smell it, feel it. It was important to me that I told the story that way because I thought that it wouldn't be told if I didn't tell it.

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.

I was only 18 when I made 'A Taste Of Honey' in the city of Salford, where writer, Shelagh Delaney set it. She was about 19 when she wrote the play based on her experiences of life and what she observed in her community.

For us, a lot of the cartoon and crazy stuff on 'F Is for Family' is tertiary characters; it happens on the television in the show. We try to keep whatever problem the Murphy family is dealing with rooted as much as we can in reality.

I saw 'Billy Elliot' again, and what I loved about it was the way it had become a social document, a reminder of what happened with the mining communities in the '80s. And I thought, 'Everyone keeps wanting me to make a sequel to 'Beckham,' but maybe a musical remake is the answer, embracing all this theatricality.'

I've never wanted to live in a ghetto or write in a ghetto. I want to write about a world that reflects the one most people live in. Gay people are just one aspect of that.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

It's interesting how thrillers reflect the times we live in.

I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise?

Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.