They're all based on factual characters. Well, a good amount of them. That's why I was attracted to this genre anyways, because these characters are so large and cartoonish, they're like caricatures, I just felt that there had to be a film made about them.
For each book, I do end up making a kind of playlist to fit the characters.
In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.
I don't like sympathetic characters.
I've done more than 70 auditions in about four years. Early on, it was hard for me because I'd become so attached to these characters, and then you'd be told, 'No.' I'd get very upset when I was younger. But now it comes with the territory.
'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.
I have interviewed Hugo Chavez, Tim McVeigh, and hundreds of fascinating characters in South America, where I have lived for the past 15 years.
The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.
I think the reason why people love 'Downton Abbey' is because all the characters are given the same weight. Some are nice, some are not, but it has nothing to do with class or oppressors versus the oppressed.
There are bits of me in all my characters.
I still recommend reading travel guides as an insight to a traveller's perspective on fantasy worlds. Nearly all characters end up travelling at some point, and they have many of the same needs and concerns covered in travel guides.
As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
I have agreed to lend my voice to Nature's Guard, an animated series which hopefully will go into production in the near future. The characters are all animals. My voice will be for a character named Longtail.
Things that go on at Happy Times are very funny this year, and if you were watching last year, some of the people you saw then as basically extras emerge as real characters in their own right this season, at least to some degree.
The fun of writing established characters is that there's a rich mythology to draw from - you get to play with toys you loved as a kid.
Now I am an old hag, I get to play much more interesting characters.
I am so lucky that throughout my career I've been able to play such different characters.
For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.
I like playing characters with internal problems.
It's kind of my whole philosophy as an actor. I think that's what we're supposed to do is play a wide range of characters - or it's just what I like to do, I should say. I like to try to be as different as I can from one thing to the next.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
My films do have characters who have trouble escaping the world around them.
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'm a big kid, I'm a kid at heart, so I still love the classic family films, such as the great Warner Bros film 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' - not the remake, but the original. It's still one of the best movies, hands down, ever made, and of course that goes back to the ingenuity of the characters and the storyline.
And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.
In most scripts, one or two characters have a lot of colors.
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'
One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters.
My siblings and I, we were raised on TV and films. Not a day went by that we weren't watching one of three movies - 'Caddyshack,' 'Animal House,' 'Beverly Hills Cop' - on rotation. Our comedy, our personalities were set watching 'Sesame Street': these really sort of wacky, Jim Henson-y characters.
Before 9/11, I was playing a wide range of characters. I would play a lover, a cop, a father. As long as I could create the illusion of the character, the part was given to me. But after 9/11, something changed. We became the villains, the bad guys. I don't mind to play the bad guy as long as the bad guy has a base.
You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.
I just always gravitate toward the kind of characters or people that maybe you don't want to talk to for a long time at a party, but you do like to watch what they're doing.
It's always interesting researching characters and as I get older and the more that I work in this business, I do more and more of it because I realize how important it is.
People who act against their own best interests are interesting characters.
