Amanda Plummer Quotes

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

I think I'm drawn to characters with complexity or who are under duress in some way and have some conflict going on.

It's not that I'm necessarily looking for things that are so dark and emotional. But if I see something where the character goes through enormous change, it's very appealing to play all those levels, and that is probably going to involve some dark moments.

I like the opportunity to play characters who have these dark sides but make the audience empathize with them. You want them to think there is some kind of sweeter, softer side to it.

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

It's fun to play a character who lives on the edge, who is an ethical and moral mess, and is paying the price for some of his actions.

One of the things that I really enjoyed playing with Ender was how he's constantly struggling between his brother and his sister. It's like he's got two sides to him. And I've always wanted to play a darker character, and in this film and in the novel, Ender has his moments where he isn't a glorified hero.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

I love characters that are going through turmoil. To be honest, I love characters with conflict. I love characters who are really going through an emotional journey; whether it's a super-dark-crazy journey or a really relatable guy.

Part of what I like about the best villains in TV and film is when you feel sorry for them, and that makes you feel even worse for feeling guilty about wanting them to succeed, in some way.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

I love playing bad. But my whole thing is usually villains that don't know that they're evil.

I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.

Clearly, I'm drawn to characters with inner conflicts.

Sometimes there is more exploration in the character for a villain.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he's very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters.

I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It's too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.