Scott Derrickson Quotes

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

I happen to like movies and plays about dislikeable people as long as I get to know why they are what they are.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

Usually, characters that are doing something nefarious have some extra layers to them. The general rule is bad people don't necessarily think they are bad.

I think conflicted characters are always more interesting.

Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I would relish a role that really shows a bit of background into how the bad guy got the way he is... a little more complex than cackling behind a hooded cloak.

Natural villains are hard to come by, what with all the shrinks and social-scientist types threatening to understand everybody into the ground.

As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.

In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people."

I think that we are all the heroes of our own story, and I think life comes in all shades of gray. Personally, I love movies that exist like this, where you think someone can behave both heroically and like a villain.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

I think I was always interested in darker characters just because there was a lot more to do.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

There are no black and white, good or bad characters in 'Game Of Thrones,' but Joffrey was an exception. Just pure evil.

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.

I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.

The characters, to me, in 'Homeland' are not one note in any way.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

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.

Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.

It's more fun to write villains. They are more of a challenge, and I get a sick kind of pleasure out of delving into their minds. There's rarely emptiness, and there is almost always deep intelligence.