Lauren DeStefano Quotes

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

I don't think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

The first couple of weeks of filming were quite tricky for me to find my feet with the character [Maigret], which wasn't helped by the story that we were telling.

The challenge was the opportunity. When I read the first draft of Steve Kloves' fabulous adaptation - I hadn't read [Michael] Chabon's book at that time - what I was immediately captivated by was this group of characters that were at once so engaging and so messed up.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

As an actor, you really want to resonate with your audience. I played a character on Oz and people still approach me in the streets today.

When I make music, I play it, I produce it, I write it. It's a very self-centered thing, not in a negative way. But I primarily work by myself, that's my process. When I'm acting, I'm there to serve the director and the character. I'm here to give you what you need. Communicate that to me and I will do what I need to do to get that. So that's what it's about.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

I live in New York, and Clara lives in Recife. The character is Brazilian, and as I read the script, I felt like Kleber [Mendonca] had been spying on me in order to create this role [in Aquarius]. Clara and I have different backgrounds. I come from an intuitive world, and she's an academic, but when we got together, we really became one. There are many times when I'm watching the film where Clara will say something, and I will find myself agreeing with her. It was the first time that I had this weird sensation that the character I played is so me, but yet it's so her.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

You never feel lonely if you're writing, because you're living with all these characters in your head.

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

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

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.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

You're responsible for your own character to a degree, because when it comes to the final draft of the script, you might say, "Well, I think maybe I could add this here, add that there." But I find that I write just as well for the other characters as I do for myself. I think.

I was curious. Here was a character where I just didn't know how they were going to write him into 13 episodes without it being one note. My fear was that I didn't want to join something where I was just going to be this prop and this mustache twirling character.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

If you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well.

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

I do not hold that because the author did a bad job of writing the player need trump it with the same kind of acting. When I go into a picture I have only one character to look after. If the author didn't do him justice, I try to add whatever the creator of the part overlooked.