John Leguizamo Quotes

You basically go in animation and it's all in the imagination. There aren't even pictures to look at. You usually go in there and work with whoever the director is to create this voice and this character.

You can actually improvise a lot as a voice actor. It's not that entirely different than shooting a live action movie; the characters mouths are quite easy to manipulate once all the information is built into the computer. So you can improvise a lot and it doesn't matter really how far along they are in the process they can really just make the character say something different.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

The character of Brent Spiner. We certainly collaborate on the concept of that, but he basically writes the script, then it's sort of a combination of his voice and my voice.

I walked around my apartment with food in my mouth asking myself: "How do I come up with this voice?" Then I found the voice. I called the director and said on the phone: "Guess who you're talking to Chris? Sid, that's right Sid!" And that's how I came up with the voice. That's a true story.

My characters all start with rhythms and sounds. Once I hear the voice and get into the rhythm, the attitude and the physicality just come out on their own.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

An animatic is a process where every voice and every sound effect is added to rough animated drawings and it lasts exactly as long as the final movie. So you actually get to go into a screening room with the rest of the cast and you get to see it all at the same time.

I think it's essential for writers to be involved in the recording process as things can often go wrong in this area. Voice actors are all too often presented with a wad of XL sheets, no proper character notes, context or reference and are just expected to perform.

I'm working on a project called Lemons, produced by Killer Films. The director has a great perspective on character development.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

It's never the practice to shoot the scenes in the proper order. Sometimes you shoot the final scenes of a film before you've even started the beginning. So you get good at it because you have to sort of just eliminate the memories of something you've done as an actor, which you haven't done as the character yet. But it sometimes is a bit of a mind-f**k.

Years and years of talking and writing versions of the script [Sausage Party] and looking at various versions of the animations - I mean, it's really a lot of workshopping and trying different things, and using the cast to try different voices and characters. And that's the good thing about animation. Because it takes so long, it allows you to explore in a way that you can't in live-action movies.

Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

All films created by Walt Disney at the time of his major outpouring of work were carefully crafted to fit scenes, characters, moods and situations. If these elements changed in any way, songs - no matter how good they were - were discarded. Others were written for the new scenes. Many times, character songs were dropped because characters were dropped...sequences were dropped etc.

There were [in Wilson] a lot of clues in it that you don't normally get, you know, normally you use your imagination or whatever, you get some clues in the script, of course, but yeah, it was really helpful, and I really like the graphic novel. There's stuff in there, there's a couple things in there I really wanted to use that they couldn't get in the movie, but it's definitely, he's a unique guy, you know, I never read a character like this before.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure.

It's just like they approach things on every movie I've worked on, very much as if it was a live-action movie. The character you're playing, even though he's a rooster and is really stupid, you approach it in the same way you would approach Hamlet, which is exactly how I approached it. But they give you the circumstances. "You're on the boat. You didn't expect to be here. You just climbed in a boat to maybe sleep. You don't even know why you climbed in the boat. You're really that dumb.

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

I was thinking about that. I was thinking, this is like our Boyhood; this is like our getting together over 12 years to make - this our Apehood! I mean, this is it! For me, the relationships, all of those things, over such a long period of time now with actors, but also seeing the characters grow, develop, and change, and go through different situations.

Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.