A good actor makes clear the meaning of the words. A better actor gives also the emotion of the part. The best actor adds emotion of which the character is unconscious.
A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.
No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.
Flawed characters... a ticking clock... morally questionable acts on all sides... moody, evocative art... oh yeah, this the stuff crime noir fans love!
It never occurred to me to write anything that didn't include gay characters in it.
What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story.
I was always trying, even in pure action movies, to find what was sensitive about the character more than the pure action.
I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.
A feverish, fearless writer, Justin Taylor delivers 'blessed pleasure' in translating the 'baffling Christ babble' in The Gospel of Anarchy, a novel whose shiftless characters, in search of completion and contentment, must wrestle with that prerequisite of faith: a willingness to believe in the unseen.
For me the visual is just as important as the music. I would never record without my red lipstick. It was my way of getting into character, sort of like Method singing.
I know a lot of other actors that don't like to look at other references to their characters and things. But I like it. I always look at everything, I read all the books. I read Dieter's "Escape from Laos." I watched the documentary again and again and again. I recorded it just to listen to him a lot. I just don't suffer from feeling like I'm getting caught into an imitation. I just feel like I want to steal some good stuff if it's in there.
I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It's wonderful, isn't it?
There are movies where actors aren't characters but movie stars, being cool beyond belief throughout the whole movie. That is what it is. And we reveal ourselves when we act, very often without noticing. But if I can manage to do a character without showing anything of myself, then that's the ultimate goal for me. No leakage.
Being able to improvise is the basis for creating all characters and situations, for everything to do with performing, really. And it's good therapy as well.
I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
People thought the storyline and characters for 'X-Files' made it a 'dark' show, but I never saw it that way. I always thought Mulder and Scully were the light in dark places.
I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.
Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.
I've always chosen the roles that aren't the direct lead because I like being a very poignant character in the story, rather than being seen in every single seen.
On social media, like on Instagram and stuff that I post, and the way that I view myself, and portray myself on there, that's definitely a much more personalized take. I'm not collaborating with people to make that, it's my own social media platform in which I'm - it's not a character, it's just me.
Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible; complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.
The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.
I'm very attracted to characters who don't necessarily make it easy to be loved.
I choose to write characters from the inside because I feel like that's the way I'm gonna get the most honest version of them.
So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.
