Gilbert Hernandez Quotes

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

I used to watch dailies and felt I had to keep on top of the character, but I don't feel that any more.

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.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

There were certain things that I tried to do on 'Karamchand.' Initially, they were hated, but eventually everyone loved the characterization.

I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.

Rather than just making a movie about video games, I wanted to start with the character and what the character was going through.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

On 'Swingtown,' I think that's when I was able to blend the character-slash-leading lady roles, and that's what I'm doing on 'Once Upon a Time' as well. She's a leading lady, but she's also this character.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.