Jeff Lemire Quotes

I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it's very simple and honest and contained. You don't need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that's another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little.

A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.

I don't have any complex plans for playing a character. I think all I try to do is not make too many bad guy faces and not ever try to seem too good. I just try to put it in the middle somewhere.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.

I tend to play more true-to-life characters in real situations.

One of my jobs as an actor, regardless of who I play - even if I'm playing a despicable character - is to make people think that that character could exist, that he's real, and the way to do that is to make him believable. He doesn't have to be likable or charming, but he just has to be believable. That is someone who I could see on a bus. That is someone who I could walk past in the street.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

Vijay Sethupathi looks a film as a film. He never looks at what kind image he is going to get out of the character.

I have immense respect for Christopher Nolan for taking a character called 'Batman' - taking a comic book - and making people believe in him in a real world context.

As a writer, I find that a good way of evolving a character is through an examination of his or her defining relationships - and what's more defining than a relationship with someone you love?

Impressionable audiences should be seeing characters that are properly fleshed out.

In some sense, there is no such thing as writing for children.

Because I came to acting quite late, I kind of think one of the few attributes that I do have is that I try to be honest with the character, with the writing. I'm not a tricksy actor; I'm not exactly a scenery-chewing kind of actor.

The only thing that I know how to do as an actor, as a trained actor, is you can't villainize the character you're playing. Whether it's a fictional character or a real character. Because then you operate from that sort of negative point of view, and you can't humanize him.

As I write, I try to be the character.

For me as an audience member, it makes the characters more relatable and interesting if they're evolving and changing - it makes them feel more real in a way. But not every cartoon is trying to be real.

I love Nicole Holofcener's films for their constant duality of humor and emotion and their focus on very real, if flawed, dynamics between funny people.

What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn't feel like fiction.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

I think flawed characters are important, because no one is perfect.

Writers don't write about people they know. They write what they know about people.

I actuall have to defend realism in theatre because I think TV does it badly - so corrupted by layers of bureaucrats who want to leave examination or psychology.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.

If it's present in the life of the character, I'll write about it. Kitchen, bedroom, church, I'll follow a character wherever they go.