Mark Billingham Quotes

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

In TV, you may think your character's one thing for two episodes, and then the third episode it could be something different.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

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

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

Well, I don't think characters change. I think they become more revealed. I don't think you really can change a character on a show.

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

I love playing Blair Cramer, and I'm thrilled to see what more they have in store for her. After playing this role for so many years, I still feel like there is so much about her that is still untold.

What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

The Duffers like that; they like watching their characters grow.

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.

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.

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.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always 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.

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.