David Thewlis Quotes

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

I admit I do develop characters from little parts of things I've seen others do.

One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

I find it very hard to sit down and create an idea or especially a new character on command. Usually my characters evolve by accident out of some story context.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

My characters are all made up of pieces of people I have known, their backstories pieces of mine.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

A lot of my characters are born out of a small grain in a person that I heighten and take to that next level. They're not based on anyone I've ever met, but they are these extreme versions of something.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.