Martin Landau Quotes

It's the same as any role and I find that you can't lump characters together; because they all have different life experiences, different reasons for being the way they are.

Each character, be it the antagonist or the protagonist, brings with himself his own personality... and I have tried to stay true to each one of them; each is enjoyable in their own way!

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

The most fascinating powers don't mean a thing if the guy's poorly motivated or dull, and the most generic powers won't hurt a well-motivated character. Personality and motivation are what make Magneto, Magneto and not Cosmic Boy. The powers work for him, but it's his motivation that makes him the character he is.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

When I develop a character, I usually start by creating a backstory with whatever information I have access to.

I like to take a character and develop it.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

I think I try to look at all my films and break them down because, at the end of the day, it's about creating characters that you like.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

In creating a new character, it's sometimes difficult to find a touchstone, a North Star that will always point you in the direction that character will travel.

I start out giving characters archetypes and parameters. Once I know the basics and have a rudimentary model, it's easier to carve unique curves and edges. It's quite easy to guess how a character is going to react if you know their background, and at a certain point, you realize you understand them personally.

If you're creating your character, you can have full ownership of the emotional range they go through. You can make bolder choices.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.