The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
I created this picture of this character who would play the guitar effortlessly, who had no limitations, performing beautiful music, and he moved around with great acrobatic skills, just capturing the audience and being a great entertainer.
I think the most important technique is to ground everything, to make everything - to make fantasy world grounded and relatable, just great characters.
'SpongeBob SquarePants' is a great show, and it centers on a character that is courageously nice. Why is SpongeBob interesting? It's because he has passion. He has a passion for chasing jellyfish.
It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.
The reason that some motion-capture films don't work is if the scripts are not good, and the characters aren't engaging, then you don't believe in the journey, and you're not connected to it. It's not the technology's fault.
I don't mind being identified as any character as long as I'm doing a good job as an actor. I have done all kinds of roles - from an editor, judge, police officer, murderer to a corrupt businessman.
I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
I hadn't done just a straight-out comedy in a long time, just letting an ensemble do really good character acting, having them carry the movie as in my earlier pictures.
If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, 'Ah that's great.'
I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.
I leave to others the decision as to the good or evil tendencies of my character, but such as it is it shines upon my countenance, and there it can easily be detected by any physiognomist.
The characters that I want to play are interesting women. I don't care if they're good women or bad women or vulnerable women or women with a lot of faults or women that we dislike intensely who are malicious.
I just like a good story. I want the story to be good and I want the character to be different than the last one I played. That's not always possible, but that's what I want.
If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.
I think sometimes actors are drawn to good television because you have more time to sell it, you have more time to shape a character, and to tell a story, and that's really appealing.
I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.
I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.
Apparently, I'm very good at firing a gun without blinking, which is unusual. That's why so many action characters have to wear sunglasses during shoot-out scenes. That's my party trick.
I might be one of the most flamboyant characters New Zealand has ever seen, but my intentions are good, and I would like to see New Zealand flourish.
