Lauren Shuler Donner Quotes

I do characters. I believe in that. I think people are interesting. Now, everybody that you meet in New York City thinks that their life is a movie.

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.

Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

I would really love to direct one day. I think there are certain actors who love the character and the performance and that's all they want to be a part of.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

As an actor, your focus is very finite. All you're worried about is your character and what you have to do, what your goals are in this scene and in this piece of material. Whereas, as the director, everything is your responsibility. I enjoy carrying the load like that and being the responsible party.

We all know that I love writing Gambit.

Visually, I want to try everything. But I believe that every shot of my films really expresses what I think about the story and the character. The most important thing is the story, not the images.

A lot of people didn't like the 'Fantastic Four' for the first year and a half. It took a certain measure of time for me to find my feet in terms of what I wanted to do with the concept.

You're out there to perform. You're out there to entertain. Whatever position that you're put in, be it a heel or a babyface, go out there steal the show.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

I have a certain kind of a taste for what will make a good movie or a good play or theater.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

Cry Baby is a character so I think that the next album is going to be about a specific thing in her life or another place in her world. It's going to be a bit deeper into a bigger picture.

It's so fun to play a character that has so many layers that people won't even know, until the next season.

In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that AVATAR’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.

I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.

Really a bad guy is more interesting, dramatically, than the good guy.

I thought, "If I could bring these characters [Wonder Boys] to life and lead the audience to react the same way I did, this could be a really special picture." Then I read Michael's [Chabon] novel and got even more enthusiastic about it.

In movies, you can basically buy the audience into the theater. If you spend enough money on visual effects, even if you are lacking in story and character, you might still pull it off.

Every writer knows a lot more about their characters and story than actually makes it onto the page.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

I think the thing that made this stand out the most was just the fact that there's a lot more character to these characters. We see their back stories and we see their present situations, and that was a lot more interesting than just the regular procedural with four heads standing around a body, spelling it out for you. It's a lot more of a roller coaster ride.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.