Vince Gilligan Quotes

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

It is quite different, but I love doing a series because you get to live with a character for a much longer amount of time. And the other aspect of it is that you have a steady job.

In the initial season of a show, you're figuring out your character and their life and their background and you're putting together all the chapters of the book.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

There's something pretty awesome about staying with a character and growing.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

I am fine playing 'Law & Order' and even the 'Jurassic' movies to be straight up, as far as the characters being portrayed there, but I never want to stay in straight-up land too long. I always wanted to do something where the character's world gets to be explored.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

I love playing Blair Cramer, and I'm thrilled to see what more they have in store for her. After playing this role for so many years, I still feel like there is so much about her that is still untold.

What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.

I think there's something really positive about getting to explore a character for a long time on a TV show and live with that character and live with the choices they make, but it's also really great to step in.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

With TV, your structure is determined by the series not the episode. You can have incident without consequence to the character, but keep your eye on the ticking clock of the series.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always evolving.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.