But because it was able to balance that kind of humor with a sweet story and characters you really rooted for and also got across the girls' point of view, I've heard nothing but great things from younger and older females as well.
I am the common man. I'm polite, I love my family and I play by the rules. And sometimes I get pushed around. That's my lifestyle, and that's what I try to bring to characters.
Especially in comedies, I think a lot of time the female characters are there to provide a balance for guys.
But in film you always watch situations or stories that you really have no relation to. A lot of times just because there's no personal connection doesn't mean you can't connect with the film or the characters in the film.
When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
It is so gratifying for me the degree to which the Minions have been embraced. It's almost unprecedented in the CG animated world. It's amazing. That's really all a creator hopes for, that their characters grow beyond them. It's like Darth Vader and Batman. They've gotten bigger than their creators.
I think that I've always been attracted to characters who are positive and come from a very innocent place. I think there's a lot of room for discovery in these characters, and that's something I always have fun playing.
My experience has offered me the sensibility that encourages me to try newer characters.
I don't like characters that are left being jerks at the end of the movie.
The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
The horses are all characters, all personalities. Some you get along with, some you don't, some might take a bit longer.
Bray Wyatt is one of the most captivating characters to come down the pike in ages.
Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. 'Hell or High Water''s a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.
I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.
I seem to voice a lot of sweet, kind of dumb yellow characters for some reason.
With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.
What I loved about 'Goodfellas' is that it's a film about bad behavior - but told with great energy and without judgment - but it doesn't actually shy away from the consequences of that behavior in the characters' lives, which I think is similar in 'Keep the Lights On.'
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
I declare I would rather be a kitten and cry, 'Mew!' than live as I see many of my female acquaintances do, tearing each other's characters to pieces, and wearing out their lives in vanity and vexation of spirit.
Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.
I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.'
I never wrote just straight women's roles. I liked the strong characters. I don't mean women who have masculine qualities about them, but something that has some intestinal fortitude, some guts to it.
The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters seriously.
Oftentimes, as women and women of color, we are put as supporting characters in other people's narratives. With 'Jessica James', she is the star of her own narrative.
The thing that attracted me to acting the most was I always felt quite unsure or insecure as a kid, and for some reason, when I got to perform these lines and characters, I felt safe. There was this confidence and excitement from performing that I loved.
One of the things I like best about the Halloween show is that I change outfits about six times in the show. It is a lot of fun to play the different characters.
Speaking only for myself, the ideal finale to me is 'Friday Night Lights,' where you have loved and worshipped a show for all these years, you get to come back, celebrate the characters, finish up their journeys, and send everyone out with a feeling of, 'My God, I'm so grateful that I got to know these people.'
The kind of actors I admire move through different characters and genres.
The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.
I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.
I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young.
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.
The thing is, I want to play real characters and not all girls can be pretty. The thing is, you get these girls who say 'I'm a character actor' then you see them in a role and nothing has really changed but the outfit.
