William Fichtner Quotes

I just always look for stuff that has a character-driven thing.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.

There are always great deals of humanity in the characters that have been offered to me.

I think really good drama comes down to real human emotion. That's what makes us all tick, and that's what I've always been drawn to when it comes to scripts is real human emotion and dealing with that.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

For me, playing a really bad character is about figuring out what brought the person to where we need him.

As readers, we want not only a strong story, but also characters we can relate to, characters that feel real. We have to find something of ourselves in them. Each character, even those only there to serve the mechanics of the plot, should have a number of layers. The entire world you are stepping into as a reader must feel real. It must have resonance, you must be able to touch the light; smell the smells.

Like anything, you've gotta find the humanity in the characters.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

Theresa Rebeck's writing is so scarily funny. I just love how unapologetic she is with her writing: she doesn't try to make her characters likeable or heroic, she just really makes them human. Hopefully, the audience is able to love them in the end - or have whatever feelings that they want to have about all of them - but I love that she doesn't have that agenda. That is something that, as an actress, was really appealing to me; to just get to be in this group of people who are complicated and very human.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

A good movie humanizes people.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

You can make a beautiful, airtight world that's fascinating to look at, but it's not interesting unless you have a character that's trying to achieve something under the circumstances of that world. It's harder to play a wacky girlfriend whose journey you just don't understand.

I really love the independent movies and I just think that sometimes when they throw a lot of money into it and a lot of special effects and a lot of stunts that you lose the connection, the human connection and I personally love movies that are about the human connection.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

I'm a character and relationship guy, and even with the 'Saw' films, it's special-effects people's jobs to create these scary things. It's not my job. My job is to bring some sense of humanity to the character, no matter how evil he may be. The script is going to take me there.

My characters all have issues, but I don't see that as weird or abnormal because I think in real life there are very few bland, normal people.

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.