Drew Goddard Quotes

As a writer, I feel like your favorite character shouldn't be safe.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

I think you have to love the characters that you write. I don't know how you could possibly write a TV show where you didn't love the characters.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

The action genre is not always the most synonymous with character development.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

I know, a lot of the films I've done, it's obvious I'm going to beat up six guys and just walk out the door. There's not a lot of motivating factors - it's just action for the sake of action.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

I definitely have character arcs in mind for each character unless I kill them.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

Watching something like 'Orange is the New Black' - the development of the characters is amazing. Or 'Breaking Bad' or 'Mad Men' - those shows went on for so long. You become so invested in those characters, and I think that's a pretty magic thing.

I believe the audience likes to see well-defined characters on screen than just larger-than-life heroes.

There are certain things that I know I don't want to do anymore. Playing out-and-out terrorists who terrorise people and don't actually move the conversation on are not worth doing. So that's probably another reason I don't go back to America, because a lot of it is like that. It's boring, dull, very lazy writing.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

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.