Amy Pascal Quotes

Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it.

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

I would really love to direct one day. I think there are certain actors who love the character and the performance and that's all they want to be a part of.

I don't really make movies with an intention other than asking myself, 'Do I love the character, and do I love the story?'

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

Definitely the script because you want to be part of an interesting story, you want your character to be a challenge, then comes the director. But essentially it's the script first and whether it's a character that you think you can do.

I think it's just the challenge. It's not that all my life I've wanted to do characters [in Marvel] , because I never particularly thought about it, but the challenge of saying, "How could they be done differently that may be more absorbing or more effective?"

"Prison Break" has been a really great experience because of the writers. I think that in television, you can have great directors, really good actors, but if it's not on the page... I think a series lives and dies in writing.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

I do characters. I believe in that. I think people are interesting. Now, everybody that you meet in New York City thinks that their life is a movie.

It was very important to me to choose a director like Gary [Ross], whose instincts come from character, who's a storyteller, and who puts characters first.

For those of us at Marvel Television, it always begins with the story. It's all about the script. It's making sure it's there, on the page. So, we needed to go to a group of individuals who have not only created some of the most memorable animated characters, like Ben 10 and Generator Rex, but also had done two seasons of our very successful Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man series, and that's the Man of Action guys. But, it wasn't just that.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.

If you have no conflict, you have no story. That's number one. That's a rule of novels.

You have that Frank Capra kind of side to it and the characters are really well drawn, so I think everybody tried their best to stay faithful to the script.

It's weird: I was in a conference room, shouting out story ideas in the voices of different characters, and it was something I had to learn because I'd never been in that atmosphere. But I think I had a quick learning curve, because this is the job I was supposed to have.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

For me as an actor, it's absolutely so thrilling to hear anybody talk about the character that I play.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Dialogue is character and character is plot.

I just rely on the text to speak for itself and then speak it as I believe it to interpret it, and then just know that the rules of the world that we're creating allow for things to come to life, and then just trust in the process of making a film. Hopefully we'll make a sequel, because if we do, we had such a great time as an ensemble, I think the best thing to do would be to just take the whole cast back. This is Iain's idea and I agree with it. Just reincarnate all the characters and put them back into the world. There's no rules. Why couldn't we do that?