Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
Schedules on TV are so tight, and it feels like they get tighter and tighter with every passing year. The idea of asking where your character's come from or where they grew up - you would just get a little bit laughed at.
If you're really being honest with yourself when you're acting, part of it is touching the real you. You can only separate yourself so much from the character. Those vulnerable moments do touch me.
To be an actor for 30-odd years trying to become recognized, and to end up playing a full prosthetic and a character 3 foot 9', or something like that, is... well, it just shows that you can get actors to do anything.
Oddly enough, I've always really loved Nightcrawler. You know who else they didn't use enough was Phoenix. I just thought her story line was so tragic. I was just really drawn to that character as well.
Jerry and I always felt that the character was enjoying himself. He was having fun: he wasn't taking himself seriously. It was always a lark for him, as you can see in my early drawings.
People recognize me on the street for all kinds of different things that I've done. 'That Thing You Do' remains to be my favorite film in which I played my favorite character. That role is the one that I'm most recognized for.
Most superheroes are painted with a specific moral objective that makes them who they are. And that moral objective influences everything they do, so there's an expectation for what you're going to see out of a certain character.
I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.
Also the clothing, people often ask why I talk about what characters are wearing. And that's really important to me, because you have to have a picture of how people moved in their clothes.
I think you always want to be open to things... it's just the matter of finding something I believe in, finding a character I believe in, and I think that's the way it should always be. I'm looking for things that excite me.
My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.
I think is very beneficial to relax yourself so that when you are doing it you are not staggering for lines and your concentration is not on what I am going to say - but the scene itself, the character that you are talking to.
Let's put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he's still the lead character.
From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.
There are probably only a certain number of people who can understand or tolerate how long a job will take and what demands it puts on you. And why should they? It breeds a strange kind of selfishness immersing yourself in a character for so long.
I designed all the characters, anyway, and Frank Doyle was doing all the writing. I didn't have any more input on what direction they were going to go with Josie.
It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.
I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.
