One thing I hate in movies is when the camera starts circling around the characters. I find that totally fake.
A new setting is amazing cause it's new for the team, and it's new for our characters. It's a breakaway from the normal deal. You get so tired, locked into a show for so many years. You get used to doing the same thing. A little shake-up and change is good.
I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.
I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.
I don't try to make actors play crazy characters. I like where there's a certain element of who they are and truth to their performances.
I get creeped out by Francis Bacon's paintings, and I can't say exactly why. They're all really disturbing, and there is an almost nimbus-like quality behind some of his frightening characters and stuff.
'Star Wars' is very black and white, and honestly, I like it that way. But fantastical settings like that work best when the characters within them feel real. Real people have conflicts and make mistakes and get it wrong sometimes.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.
I admired shows like 'Six Feet Under.' That was an amazing show. Never boring, always inventive, smart. Loved the characters. Completely original. Those are shows that I admire.
That's the thing, when you play younger characters they're always less casual. You're hungrier or more naive. Those things wane in time.
I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.
My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.
In 'Garden Party' or '40 Days and 40 Nights,' I played characters who people don't necessarily like; I just find some humanity in them.
In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.
A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Do you know Method Man's real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. That's kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters.
I think vampires are different from human beings, but they're sentenced to eternity on this planet. They have the same confusion about love and permanence, integrity, and denial. These qualities really are the same in vampire characters as in humans. I think they're universal themes.
With Marvel, I obviously don't own the characters, so there are levels of approval to go through. But I'm very seldom told no, and never without reason. Maybe I've just been lucky; I don't know, but I don't think it's as frustrating as people generally imagine. I act as though I own it all while I'm writing, I think. I hope, anyway.
It's something I'd find rather distracting in a historical piece, looking at characters that have obviously just gotten off their Ab Blaster. You see a piece set in the 1300s or the 1800s, and you've got characters who have perfect abs and are incredibly well-groomed, not a hair out of place, and it just doesn't make sense.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
Any opportunity I can get to showcase different characters, I absolutely love.
I've always been a fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. I like working with larger-than-life characters in fascinating worlds - places where the rules are different.
When I walk down the street, even here in the U.S., they are always saying my catchphrases of my characters, and they shout at me with my catchphrases.
People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.
I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.
I love Norse mythology - Thor and Odin and Loki - amazing characters.
It's easier to play quirky characters and hide behind wardrobe and make-up, especially.
For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.
I want to try and portray characters that are in real life, that you see day-to-day. If I were to just stay in my little village in Wales, I would have gotten a very small taste of a very big plate.
Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
I'm a self trained, autodidactic artist, so all I was ever trying to do was to draw as realistically as possible - but that's what comes out, because I don't really know how to draw! I think when I draw characters, I'm able to reduce them down to little marks that capture the most distinct elements of them.
Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. It's always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.
I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.
For me, acting is like a therapy. I can express myself fully when I am acting and have blood in my veins. Even when I'm not working, I'm always living in my own world, imagining characters.
I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.
