Ramy Youssef Quotes

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

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

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

I love reading for a character I have no business reading for.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

I think that characters who are nice all the time and who you sympathize with can get really boring.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.

When a character does something appalling but you still want to root for them, I find that the most exciting challenge to play, if you can pull it off. You're not supposed to like it, but you can't help it.

As a viewer, I care about people, I care about characters, I care about perspective.

There's people who watch shows while they're preparing their dinners, and they don't want to focus, and they don't want to be challenged, and whatever. And then there's people who want to really sit down and get into a character in a world, and feel like they're expanding, or they have complex relationships, or whatever.

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

I really do believe that no one is too pious to fall or too far gone to be redeemed in some way. Jaime Lannister on 'Game of Thrones' did terrible things, and now I feel so bad for him because his sister won't kiss him. Isn't that weird? Does she not love him? He lost a hand! It kills me that I care.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

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.

I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

I don't like two-dimensional characters who are obviously villains from the moment they walk on stage.