Donnie Yen Quotes

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

When a director narrates a character, I find it normal to ask questions about the character's background, mood swings, eccentricities, behaviour... I do this to make my performance relatable. Directors who don't know their characters well find it difficult to answer these questions and, hence, find me annoying.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

I try to get roles that challenge me in what I can do and who I think I can portray. For me, it's about creating characters with really fascinating stories, because that's what I like to watch on TV.

My characters are not plastic.

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

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

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

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

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

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

I don't really ever think about whether or not I like the characters I'm playing. I'm more into the minutiae of their behaviour or what they're doing in a certain scene.

Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications.

It's very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I'm able to bring. But playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story - responsibility to the film-maker to deliver the goods.

I just want to keep finding special characters that I feel like I can bring to life and characters that are real and not superficial.