Russell Smith Quotes

I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

Roles for women need to be better written.

I'm a huge fan of 'Buffy,' 'Angel' and 'Doctor Who.' People like Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies, and Steven Moffat are really amazing about making you feel like you had a complete meal and yet leaving you hungry for more.

Especially in comedies, I think a lot of time the female characters are there to provide a balance for guys.

The history of fan fiction demonstrates how efficient, and effective, women have been at pooling together to get what they want out of their stories. It's been a largely female-driven world.

There have been a few times when I've read a script and it's really cool but the girl character's just kind of pathetic. It's not going to do me any favours just being 'the girl' in a cool movie.

I want to do a little bit of everything. I love sci-fi. I think it's more the characters that draw me towards things. I like strong women. I'm very interested in futuristic stuff, anything.

As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.

If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.

I don't try and write strong female characters or strong male characters, I just try and write, hopefully, strong characters and sometimes they happen to be female.

There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'

Far too often, I read a script where the girls are the girlfriend or the set dressing.

I'm so bored of reading scripts with these wonderfully complex male roles, yet the woman character just sits on the bed waiting for him to come home.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.

It's nice to see more of those meaty female characters emerging because so often in the industry, it's always about the males.

People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. I don't feel like that's my specialty.

It's great to have female characters that have depth that you can explore instead of being the decoration or the girlfriend or the wife.

I think people get confused: people think 'strong female characters' mean you need to play an action figure.

All too often, female characters, in particular, aren't multi-layered enough.

It's not that I only want to make films about women, but from my experience, I have been very interested in the women who play these characters.

I was always looking for the female characters in sci-fi and fantasy who were more than just the girlfriend.

I'm very proud of the fact that the women on 'The Americans' are written to be equally complex as the men.