Jan de Bont Quotes

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I think we're very complicated and we're capable of all kinds of things, and movies don't reflect that.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.

I like playing characters that are true to life, and there's no guarantee that any of us are going to be okay, but we intend to be, and we take the time to try to be. I don't think it's any different for a character.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

I think people have a lot of layers. I know I do in particular.

Even while I'm really interested in playing female characters that are varied and interesting and dynamic, I'm not of the mind that you always want to play strong female characters. I think I just want to play characters that are interesting, and not all people are 'strong.'

I've never loved a character as much as I do Niska. The way she's been written is so complex, with huge amounts of light and dark. It's a really satisfying challenge to play someone who is superhuman in their intelligence and physical ability but completely naive when it comes to certain aspects of life.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

I'm not the dude with the message. I'm a human being with different sides, different shades and different emotions, different feelings.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!