Steven Knight Quotes

[The Girl in the Spider's Web] can't be anything other than a sequel, but a couple of books have been skipped, so it is different, in that sense. It's really taking a very strong central character and thinking, how do you execute this? It's quite different.

For me, the story must be the hero of the film. The screen space or the length of my role does not matter.

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

I just don't ever want to play the girlfriend. You know, the supporting character in the background who just sort of comes in and goes, "Oh, shucks." It's just a boring character.

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

I'm hesitant to do leading man character roles because I think they can be a little boring in terms of needing to be the everyman who navigates the amazing stuff around them.

Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.

A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie.

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.

I have absolutely no interest in playing the young male lead around which a story happens.

You don't read many scripts, especially for crime dramas, that feature a strong woman as the central character.

I always think once you have the lead protagonist, you cast around that character.

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

You look like a protagonist.

For me as an actor, it's really fun to play someone who's not human.

Books are a really fun way to get yourself in a certain mindset or mood as an actress. Also, the way people tell a story is so revealing and I think it's important as an actress to see all the different ways people can unravel a story, and introduce the characters and the way people speak.

I can work inside the boundaries of Erika Murphy, or whoever the character is. It's fun to create somebody that's not you, that doesn't exist.

As an actor, there was that freedom of not having to worry about lights or marks or other people. It was just going out there and having fun with the character.

I crave the diversity because I'm an actor and it's more fun to play different types of characters, but I'm pretty spontaneous as well, so I don't rule anything out.

When I used a woman in my films or wrote a woman into my film, I wanted her to be a central point and a motivating point or a catalyst to function in the film.

If you don't invest in the characters, you don't care if they get killed. It's more fun if you know them.

We would choreograph [ with Paul Dano] before each scene [in Swiss Army Man] and very quickly got to a place where we could improvise physically in scene and know that the other person would respond in character appropriately. So that [dynamic] was a lot of fun.

I think Night Court was the first thing I did when I came out to Hollywood. It was just one of those things that... I'm from Texas, and it was a character I'd been doing when I was a kid, just for fun.

It was really fun and intimate in a way. Working with George Miller is exquisite. Gloria is different from anything I've ever played before. The first time I saw the characters in the studio I remember thinking that Mumble looked just like Elijah, with such a cute and endearing face. I don't think Gloria looks that much like me.

Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.