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.
When you are dealing with something that's crazy, you still want actors to play characters and find the reality of the situation, no matter how absurd the situation is.
There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
With any actor, if you know your character well enough, you'll know pretty much what he would say under any circumstance, or whatever situation might rear its head.
All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.
I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.
The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
And I'm so excited to remind people and even gain new fans who find out about Dharma - a new generation who could find out about Dharma and enjoy her and all the characters on the show.
We knew we'd never find someone called Rock Hard, which was our ideal name, and for a while we toyed with the idea of just creating the character but never letting him get seen.
My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
Chavez made a compete fool of himself in front of the entire world while giving the U.N. a black eye. But the real losers are the Venezuelan people who have to put up with this unstable character every day.
Besides, it doesn't make any sense to have these characters living in the year 3000 when all their points of reference are from the pop culture of the 80's and the 90's.
I guess you can say that every actor is a 'character actor' on some level. But I think some actors have a wider range. I think that's how you get that mantle.
If you're playing the character, you could say to yourself in 16 different ways, What if that didn't bother me? What if I knew exactly what he was talking about? What if I didn't get excited?
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
