Mads Mikkelsen Quotes

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

'The Wire' is similar to 'The Walking Dead' in so far as everybody pulling for everybody else to get to the turning point of the story.

There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

My stories are character driven.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.

For the most part, romance is written in third person, and it's written in multiple points of view, so you're in the hero's head, and you're in the heroine's head. I've always said that I'm more of a narrator than a creator.

It's an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel - it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.

I hope they find some way to come up with a new story that involves Beast in my timeline.

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

I'm kind of down for anything, as long as it's an amazing script that speaks to me, so I'm just constantly reading and constantly looking.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water's a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

You don't want to make performances; you want to make people. When a project knows, 'Okay, my bad guys need to be a little sympathetic, and my good guys need to have a bit of a mean streak,' you're off to a good start.

I like to write about characters who are conflicted.

As an actor, I'm always interested in my characters getting into trouble, because conflict is, you know, the great determiner of someone's mettle.

A strong story can move me to tears, and it doesn't matter whether it's a science-fiction or fantasy world. It's about what happens to a person, the choices they make. That's what's interesting.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

A lot of readers and a lot of editors had a story problem with Oracle, in that she made for such an easy, convenient story accelerator, that we missed the sense of having characters have to struggle to discover, to solve mysteries. Famously, it helped make Batman less of a detective and more of a monster hunter.

In theatre, you learn the story is more important than the actor.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

I am on the lookout for smart scripts and stories where my role has weightage.