In some ways, you kind of take a personality and drop it on the ground, and it breaks into a bunch of little pieces, and you kind of water those pieces, and it grows into characters. So they're all me in a way.
Portraying emotionally ill characters gives me the chance to really act.
I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.
I find that, maybe because I'm also a singer, I hear music in characters all the time, even if they don't sing. I hear what affects me in my heart.
The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.
When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.
It would have shown people that I was prepared to do that kind of work, although I find myself in a position now where I don't really need to and I could pick and choose the kind of characters I'd like to do.
The Ewoks were definitely a challenge of writing 'The Jedi Doth Return.' After having done so many things with characters who don't speak English, how was I going to make them stand out? Jedi is also rich with emotional material, particularly Darth Vader's transformation from the dark side back to the good.
I want to continue to play characters that are not like me at all, and transform.
Two phrases I hate in reference to female characters are 'strong' and 'feisty.' They really annoy me. It's the most condescending thing. You say that about a three-year-old. It infantilises women.
I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.
I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.
Unfortunately, in television today there are very few African-American characters who are human beings. They are typically two-dimensional stereotypes, cookie-cutter types.
Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves.
I have had issues in the past with the characters and the limitations of the characters and the structure of the narratives given to me as a woman of color.
We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
It's the same as any role and I find that you can't lump characters together; because they all have different life experiences, different reasons for being the way they are.
What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.
It's a very big world with some very big characters. And, boy, do you have to be able to stand up for yourself when you walk into a working men's club and negotiate a loan.
I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
The work that I do with all of my characters is have some sense of where they come from. I kind of create my own story for myself. What's going on with my parents? Are they alive? Or family - do I have children? Do you see those things or not?
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.
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.
The magic in performing as an entertaining ventriloquist happens when the characters come to life and the interaction between the separate personalities on stage becomes 'real.' Then don't forget that the act has to be funny, and to me, being funny and entertaining any given audience is more important than anything.
I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior.
Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.
Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it's a story that's on a stage, but there's a different sort of tension that appears on stage - you get to see your characters in a different way - like with lights.
My agent will say, 'Well, it's another graphic novel.' I don't care. It's better writing than anything else that's out there. The characters are much better.
I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
It's sad that women characters have lost so much ground in popular movies. Didn't 'Thelma and Louise' prove that women want to see women doing things on film? Thelma and Louise were in a classic car; they were being chased by cops; they shot up a truck - and women loved it.
Mos Def is one of the most creative, intelligent human beings I've had the opportunity to work with. He is fun. The entire time, he would go in and out of different characters, just for the fun of it. Awesome energy.
The Big Chill is one of those things that everybody can identify with. Between eight characters, they can pick somebody who's somewhat like them.
