Jez Butterworth Quotes

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it.

What is their potential for evil; what is their potential for wickedness? That's the only time that those characters become interesting to watch.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

Of course I know my characters are unlikable sometimes or have prejudices. It's not as if I'm thinking they're so endearing all the time. I guess it's much more interesting to me to write someone who is a combination of good and bad qualities because that's what people are like in real life.

Do I want a character who just has the best motives and the best intentions, zero flaws, and is doing things for the right reasons? No!

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.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

I like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect.

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

When it's a moral grey zone, the audience has to think about what they feel and what they think is right or wrong. You want to affect your audience and make them think.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

The characters that have greys are the more interesting characters. The hero who sometimes crosses the line and the villain who sometimes doesn't are just much more interesting.

... sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

This high-end, novelistic form of TV, you know, is just peppered with despicable people who do marvelous things and marvelous people who do despicable things.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.