John Jay Chapman Quotes

In the surface of the paper there is only length and width-there is no such thing as thickness.

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.

I'm drawn to dark characters, and to things that are really weighty.

The films that I do are deep, introspective, brooding roles that you're in this heavy headspace all the time.

Because I had a lot of emotional upheaval in my life, I'm attracted to stories about characters whose lives are full of wounds and secrets. I'm not interested in who's going to ask me to the prom. I never went to a prom.

I love gritty drama. I'm passionate about films and drama that make you think - hard-hitting, gravelly characters.

The primary factor is proportions.

As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

You know, it's a long world.

People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there's a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

I love playing characters who are multilayered and multidimensional and have a darkness to them, which makes them more realistic and more fun to play.

I always respond to characters who have depth. I'm always interested in those people. They're the ones who surprise you.

I want to play characters that are real, that have depth in them.

When you mix raisins and turds, you've still got turds.

I experience each moment like baklava: rich in this layer, and this layer, and this layer.

I love playing characters that go to extreme places, and I love to explore different kinds of psychological landscapes, so it is ultimately a kind of fun, but it's also complicated and colored by the depth of the nastiness of it, at certain times, as well.

I suppose I tend to like slightly darker things - people have levelled that on me before and I accept that because in my opinion, if I mention the best movies or the best books, there's always something that's involving slightly darker element of out psyche. I like seeing people under pressure. I like seeing what happens to people when they're under pressure.

We can't do much about the length of our lives, but we can do plenty about it's width and depth.

I love characters that are going through turmoil. To be honest, I love characters with conflict. I love characters who are really going through an emotional journey; whether it's a super-dark-crazy journey or a really relatable guy.

I probably could have gone in depth about a lot of things, but then the album would've been longer. You can't have a short album when you're talking about suicide and cocaine. That's not going to be a short album.

A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.. ..It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.