It's so much easier for me to get up and be someone else than expressing my own thoughts and feelings. There's definitely something about creating a cloak of a character that helped me deal with my shyness.
It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
Harrison Ford comes on set, and he's very polite and says, 'Hello' to everyone. He cares about everything that's going on, on set. He cares about what's going on with your character and what's in the scene and what's on the desk.
The story line was done in a way that's organic and was doled out very slowly in little bites. We think that's authentic for this character, that her feelings are very deeply buried or she never felt them.
With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
I don't know if I am cut out to playing a bad character or not - I really should give it a shot. I would like to play the voice of a baddie, but that's really just a cop-out!
For me, being able to be vulnerable is difficult, but it's just something that I feel comfortable doing. I need to fully understand why, the thought-process behind the character and I have to believe it. That comes from a lot of preparation.
I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!
There seems to be more opportunities for old guys like me to do a little fighting and running because the lead characters also require a bit of depth and maturity and gravitas that one is likely to acquire doing drama all those years.
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.
