Matt Ross Quotes

I'm very glad people love 'Breaking Bad,' but the harder character to write is the good character that's as interesting and as engaging as the bad guy.

The most interesting heroes have a bit of villainy to them, and the most interesting villains have a certain bit of heroism in them. I think (Alan Shore) intends to do the right thing, but his view of the world is very different so, to get to the right place, he sometimes takes a path that goes through a very dark forest.

I think that there are just people who are hurting other people, sometimes for the best of intentions and sometimes for the worst. In different times in my life, I've been the hero and I've been the villain. I also think that we're all evil sometimes.

I'm not in the business of making us look clean, but I don't want us to look like monsters either. I think there is a little bit of hero and villain in all of us.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

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.

If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.

I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

I don't like movies that are morally simple.

I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

I'm most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

I've always had antiheroes in my film.

I'm always interested in what we're not being shown. So if you're playing ostensibly a quote-unquote 'baddie,' what are their good sides, and vice versa.

Broadchurch' was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.