Deborah Moggach Quotes

I think in many ways, I'm sort of a blank canvas, because in many ways, I'm just observing the world and the people around me and their characters and letting them kind of explode off me and to find out why they're doing what they're doing. But then every once in awhile, I get to take on a whole new character.

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

In the case of the 'Saint' movie, I did do some research. I visited a few shelters. But usually, my stuff just comes out. I don't have any control over that.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.

I made Tony a person. For me, Tony was real. I made him become a human being, and that affected the animation and everything.

I have always believed that an artiste needs to respond to a story first. One has to feel it in order to live it.

When I'm given a role, I'm consumed by a passion to bring to life a character that exists only on paper. I mull over the character for days and internalise his feelings.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

When I'm making the movie, I absolutely do. I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

I was just infused with ideas and I would dream about it and wake up and go, "Oh, I have another idea about Walter White." It was so well written. And it just got into my soul.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.