David Leitch Quotes

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don't really see the value in it... humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.

How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

People have to respond to the characters and respond to the situations that they're in. That said, it still has to be a compelling narrative that drives along and keeps people coming back week after week. So really, with any successful show you could name, there has to be a mysterious blend of both of those.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

Everything that I am going to do as an actress doesn't matter where it's coming from. It just has to be interesting.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

It's such a gift when you know who you're writing for and you know that that actor is capable of so much that you can relax a bit.

It's much easier for me to think in terms of character movement and emotion and story rather than, 'What are some wacky hijinks we can throw together?'

I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve 'Uncle Vanya' or find a solution for 'Henry V.' Plays aren't puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.

I'm an actor, and I want to play flawed characters, and I'm a writer that wants to write flawed characters, trying to let something out and hoping people relate through that or have fun experiencing the story.

This isn't a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It's not really sports. It's entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can't create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.

Imagining what a character will do in a given situation - it's like an equation, and working it out is a marathon rather than a sprint.

The sense of discovery only comes when I'm making discoveries alongside the reader. It feels crucial for me to not know too much about how things will turn out. So I try to develop strong characters with recognizable desires and put them together with other characters and see what happens.

The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.