Steve Earle Quotes

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

It can be a fictional character and yet relatable... It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.

Television is about identifying with the characters.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.