The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.
On the surface, it's really easy to dismiss certain characters, but sometimes you find that the most interesting parts are disappointingly shallow. It's your job as an actress to pull that person apart, and work out why they act the way that they do.
To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.
In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.
Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses - which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you're playing a cartoon character.
I made a decision not to work out because I'm lazy and also, the character is not a superhero. I didn't want him to be a buff guy with Jackie Chan moves because the point is he's smarter than your average Joe.
Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in 'The Fugitive.' That's how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.
Every once in awhile I like to play dark ladies, crazy ladies, but most often I look for characters that are strong, intelligent, caring - usually earth women, because that's basically how I see myself.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Older women know who they are, and that makes them more beautiful than younger ones. I like to see a face with some character. I want to see lines. I want to see wrinkles.
I like characters who are larger-than-life, whether life-loving women or the artist or guru who grabs everything. But I don't live among people like that.
I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.
With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
