Gaspard Ulliel Quotes

When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

Mike Leigh encourages you to choose a person that you know to base your character on. You write a whole list of people that you know and you go through that list in great depth with him. And then he chooses one of those people from your list.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I like writing historical fiction.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

What's nice about playing somebody real is that generally there's more information about them, so a lot of the questions that you'd otherwise have to make up the answers to are already there.

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

Writing history takes a great deal of imagination. I don’t mean making things up, but you have to be able to transport yourself to another time.

I see it in a lot of period pieces where everybody is standing and talking, in a stilted, archaic way, instead of being loose in the world. So, I try to do a little bit of research, just so that I can feel like I'm grounded, but then I try to bring as much of my human understanding that I can, under the filter of it being 1865.

If you get too deep into the history, what often happens to a lot of us actors is that we become stilted. We forget that we're reading about something that happened a hundred years ago. If we don't put the human emotion that would naturally be in there, we end up being stilted instead of being human beings.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I am no historian but have tried to stick tight to the facts.