Well, I think I've made 44 films and only like four times I've played real characters I'm just drawn to people who have a pioneer spirit, this extraordinary energy and commitment to their cause.
As I got further into my career, as a character of color, if I was going to have the types of opportunities I felt I deserved, and continue to have them, I was going to have to start creating those opportunities for myself.
Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.
No matter how much I plan the overall arc of the character, you get there day one on the film and you shooting certain scenes first, and it goes completely different to anything you ever thought of, and then it's done.
With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.
In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.
Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.
What it made me realize was that a show like this makes people look inside themselves. Because this crew guy isn't sitting there wishing the character would fight back. He's hoping that he would fight back.
When you're playing a real character, you want to honor that person and receive inspiration from that person. They need to anoint you in some way that allows you to borrow just a small piece of their soul. That is the flame.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.
I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.
I am just another fireman because the story focuses on Joaquin Phoenix's character, but I play Joaquin's close friend and I get burned up a little bit, but I don't die.
I guess I really always wanted to act. When I was seven, I actually had the opportunity to come out to California. I've always really loved playing a part, playing a character and being someone else.
A lot of banging in the head has built up over the decades, and for my own sanity, I needed to write. I wanted to see if I could tell an honest, organic story about characters that interest me.
I'm very opinionated, and when you're put in a position where you're getting the storylines that are not necessarily what's cranking at the back of your mind, or digging at the potential of your character and you have to sit on your hands, that's fru...
Insight into character comes from listening intently to the spoken word. The physical person, their charisma, charm and dramatic flair is more often used to persuade audiences, as they use these stealth tools of disguise and deception.
It is impossible to watch a 'Friends' episode too many times. Phoebe is my favourite character. I used to play her songs on the guitar when I was a teenager. 'Smelly Cat' is very easy. It's only about three chords.
The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.
In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown.
