Abbas Kiarostami Quotes

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.

When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.

I think sometimes it's sort of easier to be playing a role based on a real person because there's quite often a lot more information, you're not making it up, it's there in books, it's there in research form. But really the questions you ask about the character, and why people behave, and where they come, and how they've ended up in the places they've ended up are the same.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

I've discovered I can't make a film about people I dislike.

Every character I do is based on someone I know.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

There are some indications of how the character should behave based on the script, and then as actor makes it his or her own. I got to know one of the writers, Chris Terrio, and we were able to discuss things at length and figure out who this person is to create a real psychology behind what is, perhaps, in a comic book, a less than totally modern psychology. I can only say I've been asked to play an interesting role. A complicated, challenging person.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

I always get role models, people from real life who've lived the lives of the characters, and talk it through together, me, them and the actor, a lot. That helps. We certainly have our disagreements. But in the end we trust each other.

When you're directing, I feel like I'm playing all the parts, without the make-up. I really get into the heads of the characters.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.