Harrison Ford Quotes

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

If somebody is in a story, they need to be there for a reason, and not just to set up somebody else's story.

I look for what responsibility the character has in telling the story. If you remove the role from the story, can you still tell the story properly? And if the answer is no, then I'm interested.

I think every character is important in every film - be it small, primary, or lead - because they are adding something to the story, taking it forward.

I'm not a writer, inherently. Most of the writers I've met have stories they need to tell. I don't have that. I'm an interpreter. I like getting a script, seeing a character and thinking, "Oh, wow, I know what I can do with that."

What I had found after the success of Karate Kid II is that an actor basically needs to - a primary requirement on my part as how I view as actor is you have to create a background, you have to create a history of that character and place her into the script that you're reading and carry on forward because you don't know how the future unfolds. This is what storytelling is you place a certain set of circumstances with a certain set of characters and you see what unfolds after an event happens.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Whether I'm interested [in something] or not, step one is read the script and figure out if a character is someone I'd want to explore or not.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.

What draws me to roles, I think, are moments - moments that define character, where so much more of the story is told in just a moment - a look, a line, a short scene, but something that speaks a volume, something that speaks to me.

The metaphor is the story, not the character.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

What I think after reading the script and seeing where the story goes, I go with my instincts on the character. If my instincts are wrong the director and the producers will guide me in the right direction. That's just kind of how I take on any role, be it a fantasy movie or not.

I love the supporting characters because you get to do more, to be totally honest. It's been sort of a theme with me. In Son of No One, I think I might have seven lines in the entire movie because everything is happening to my character.

Tom [Cruise] is a great producer himself. He's got great sense of story. It's always great to have the perspective of the person who's playing the character in your film.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

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.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

You know, my problem with most screenwriting is it is a blueprint. It's like they're afraid to write the damn thing. And I'm a writer. That's what I do. I want it to be written. I want it to work on the page first and foremost. So when I'm writing the script, I'm not thinking about the viewer watching the movie. I'm thinking about the reader reading the script.

I think you have to ask yourself, what is the point of the script? What is the script selling? Because all scripts are political, every story is political. It either challenges or reinforces some schism or stereotype. So what is the project going to say at the end of the day? What does it tell you about the world, or what does it challenge in terms of your world?

I just rely on the text to speak for itself and then speak it as I believe it to interpret it, and then just know that the rules of the world that we're creating allow for things to come to life, and then just trust in the process of making a film. Hopefully we'll make a sequel, because if we do, we had such a great time as an ensemble, I think the best thing to do would be to just take the whole cast back. This is Iain's idea and I agree with it. Just reincarnate all the characters and put them back into the world. There's no rules. Why couldn't we do that?

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.

I was a voracious reader and I could never understand why comics were of any less merit or importance than any other way of writing. I think the thing that keeps me with comics is there's still so much to be done. There's still this huge unplowed field, this huge unexplored wilderness, and as long as I can keep doing new things and coming up with new things, I will.