Character Quotes - Page 220

I don't think a lot of people really understand the commitment it takes to being a character that an actor in Hollywood would take to approaching a role that they're doing.

I really love being a character actor. I have to say I wish it were a little easier. There are still a lot of things that I don't get, like I do wish I had more of my own.

I like playing dark, offbeat, quirky characters.

Faith idles when character shrivels.

I think I find new idols every day - someone that says something really inspiring, is successful, has character.

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?

I'm trying to show I'm a trained actress - I can transform myself into different characters. I'm not just an ingenue.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on people. I could rationalize it - oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I'm writing - but it's basically just nosiness. It also helps me gauge where I'm at: Am I normal?

I just have my characters say my controversial opinions and then hide behind them.

Here's my feeling: For everyone, men and women, it's important to be a feminist. It's important to have female characters. It's wonderful for women to mentor other women, but it's just as important for women to mentor men and vice-versa. In my line of work, having Greg Daniels be such a great mentor to me is fantastic. Finding a writer's assistant, be it a man or a woman, and encouraging them to think with a feminist perspective, is key.

As an actor it's like, go with whatever excites you as an actor. What are you're going to invest yourself in as a character? What are you going to get into? Have a variety of characters to play.

I think there's an initial shedding of the skin of a character when you've played them for so long, almost like a snake losing its skin. But when a job is done, I kind of walk away from it because I know that I need to prep for whatever else I'm going onto - I need to get back to being myself, which... Who knows exactly who that is, with all the talking voices in my head. You know, back to being a bit of a blank slate again. It becomes a necessity as an actor - at least for the way that I act.

What's interesting about the movie and characters is that they're one thing to the world and another thing in their heads.

I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there's funny stuff in it but I've lost the emotional connection to the characters because it's just so bananas.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.

People ask me to record their answering machines all the time. I love it. It's a miracle to me that people want to hear back those characters.

I wish I could say I had any idea what I was doing when I designed characters. I just take things I like and make my version of it.

Why should every single character be an honor student who goes around helping others and never doing anything wrong? Is that like the rule or something?

Here is the operating motto of the Obama White House: 'So let it be written, so let it be done!' Like Yul Brynner's Pharaoh Ramses character in Cecil B. DeMille's 'The Ten Commandments,' the demander in chief stands with arms akimbo issuing daily edicts to his constitution-subverting minions.

I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.

Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.

A winemaker never, never changes the character of a wine. The character comes from the grapes.

One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct.

I guess because you study the character and you do all those things. But when it comes down to it, it's still my performance, it's still my interpretation. I'm not going to, you know, be a clone - well, I was a clone of Richard Dean Anderson!