Max von Sydow Quotes

The first thing I read was of my character on the phone talking to Sydney's fiance. Though short, it was so beautifully written, and it made me laugh. I thought if I wanted to play a character, this would be it.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

It's always interesting researching characters and as I get older and the more that I work in this business, I do more and more of it because I realize how important it is.

Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.

The roles I'm interested in or have been interested in, you know, it's going to get down to conflict. Drama is conflict - conflict of interests.

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

I'm all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Basically, every character I've ever played, I've based entirely on internal conflict. And I love doing that, because I think it's very human.

My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work.

I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

If the characters are acting true to themselves, then that chemistry and suspense will flow.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.