One of the greatest tools you have as a songwriter is anonymity. If someone knows too much about the songwriter, they don't get to insert their own characters. I don't want the audience thinking about the gay guy who wrote the song.
I don't really have a process. I'm very much an in-the-moment actress. I suppose I just kind of wing it because I feel that as long as I know my character, I should be able to be spontaneous on set.
I actually think the reason I am interested in certain parts is because I was such a dweeb in high school. When you are such a loser, it's a helpful way in to a lot of characters because even very powerful people are not all that powerful, really.
When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks... that's just rewarding and humbling.
'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.
Acting has always been a way for me to express the emotions I had buried. If I hadn't acted, I would have gone insane. In my acting class, I could let out my real tears and everyone thought it was the character. But no, it was me.
Choice betrays character,” I said. “That’s not true.” Loring moved his finger along the sheet as if writing his name in cursive. “Eliza, you can’t judge a man solely on his actions. Sometimes actions are nothing more than reactions.
It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!
Every role you play is literally - and I've said this before - every single role that you play, the only way you can connect to that character is because that was a piece of you that was scattered around that yard, almost like we got caught up in som...
It's about the characters, it's about the film, it's about the process of making stunning visuals and a huge, epic movie. It doesn't matter if my head was covered in a black plastic bag and I was bouncing around in a space hopper: That's the villain ...
I was so lucky because what I did in 'Thor' was I built the character from the ground up - the foundations of his spirit, really. He was someone who was born with an expectation that he would one day be a king, born with an entitlement.
As an actor, if I just did sci-fi, I think it would get limiting, like if you just play lawyers or doctors, over and over. It's a lot more fun, if you get to play lots of different types of characters.
I try to get roles that challenge me in what I can do and who I think I can portray. For me, it's about creating characters with really fascinating stories, because that's what I like to watch on TV.
I was honestly a cartoon kid. I loved cartoons. That was more my dream than anything else. But now, it's the films of people like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Those are the kinds of characters I want to play, and that's the kind of filmmaking I...
Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart be...
In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.
The original and very basic 'Law & Order' series has always seemed to me to be 100-percent exposition, with no filler, no pesky nuances and almost no background about the series' continuing characters - just the hard nuts and bolts of pure storytelli...
Learning to endure times of disappointment, suffering, and sorrow is part of our on-the-job training. These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our chara...
Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that’s right is to get by,and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught.
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.
