Curtis Hanson Quotes

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

I want to do interesting characters with depth, which are a part of great stories. In fact, if the character is quirky and challenging, that's even better.

I feel like a lot of characters on TV don't have the time to tell that many aspects of a character's story and personality.

It's always fun to layer a character, to make the character a little bit more dynamic than it is on paper.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

Whether it's a lower or higher budget project, a TV show or a film, the words on the page are the same to me and I approach the work in the same way. My job is to lift the character from the page, whether it's a TV or film script.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

I try to have a balance of things you like and things you don't like about a character. But once you start that, all these scripts are like, "You play the douchebag friend of Ashton Kutcher." It's all these characters that are overconfident or hyper-masculine.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

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.

Yeah, we've become really good friends. Our characters start dating in the book, and um, yeah, I think we - and we made up little back stories to our characters and little outtakes that we'd bring up to Edgar as a joke, and you know, kind of see different sides of stuff. So yeah, we have a really good time.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

In playing the part of Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character, the way she appeared to me in the book.