Clive Standen Quotes

That's what a powerful story does. It creates a more intense experience of life for you to watch. That's what a good film does for me, anyway. That process, I enjoy. It just makes for entertaining characters and entertaining films.

When I sat down with the creators of the show [Longmire], back when we were first starting to do the pilot, Branch was not that interesting on the page. What really sold me on the show and the character was their vision for him. It took the whole first season to flesh him out.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

The other main difference between film and television is that you have the opportunity to flush out a character, over a longer period of time. Whereas with a film, you're confined to two or three hours, or whatever it may be.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I make films because I am endlessly fascinated by people. I'm fascinated immediately to know about the lives that are going on around me. That is what drives me. And that is because everybody matters, everybody is there to be cared about, everybody is interesting and everybody is the potential central character in a story. Judging people is not acceptable.

I read the script and I really liked it. It was high energy, crazy and it goes to any level to get people nuts and I thought Eve was an interesting character. At first I didn't get her, so it made me want to do the role because I wanted to dive in and see what she was about. On top of that I also wanted to work with Jason Statham because he's an amazing actor.

I'd always loved movies, but it wasn't some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, "I want to write things, and I want people to see them more."

When you have a set of characters, you have to fall in love with them and care about them as each individual character.

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

My favorite thing in the world is telling stories, and most of what I do is telling stories through music.

It's really hard to make a good film; it's really, really hard. So, the director's very important, and a character that can be described with more than one or two adjectives, maybe with contradictions. Contradictions are always good because that's truthful.

Everything you could want - action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game.

I don't think I've seen that sort of character in a long time in this genre because again, there was a time when you could have quirky, strange characters that you grew to love, you didn't quite understand, you know, and then all of a sudden they became almost cardboard cutouts for awhile. You kind of know the guy, what his deal is - this guy's hard to figure out. He has some strange habits, but, you learn to love him and you discover more about him, where it comes from.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

That's what makes characters interesting. If Sherlock [Holmes] had started out being a straightforward man, we wouldn't be talking about him now. If he became one, that would be interesting. But you have to give him somewhere to go, as [Conan] Doyle did.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

My only want and wish, really, was to tell a good story. I wanted to do good work, tell a good story, and give the character a voice. Those were my only expectations.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

I think that television has become really, really interesting, in terms of character development. You can have 13 hours to develop a character, as opposed to 25 minutes in a movie. That excites me.