Hayao Miyazaki Quotes

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.

If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more.

I often play women who are not essentially good or likable, and I often go through a stage where I hate them. Then I end up loving and defending them.

I don't really approach a character as to whether or not it's good or bad. I just approach a character as to where it lives in me.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

I think that characters who are nice all the time and who you sympathize with can get really boring.

People always tell me I'm nothing like my character. Well, hopefully not! He's a character who's very defined. He was purposefully written by Jo Rowling as very one-dimensional in the first few books, because you're supposed to hate him.

I've been playing the bad guy in the last seven or eight projects I've done. I like it. It's a lot more interesting! Being the good guy gets a little stale after a while, you know?

When a character does something appalling but you still want to root for them, I find that the most exciting challenge to play, if you can pull it off. You're not supposed to like it, but you can't help it.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

It's very tricky to throw a morally flexible character onto the screen and have an audience empathize. It's always an exercise in restraint.

I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad.

I would love to play just an all out bad guy who has fun being malicious. It would be totally unexpected, and that's what would make it exciting. Plus, bad guys don't see themselves as bad guys, so you could have fun with that.

In general, I am more interested in the darker characters when I watch or read stories.

'Masaan' was a small role, but people connected with it. I loved playing a man who does not have many complexities in life. I was inspired by my father for this role. You find such characters in novel or in stories. You don't find such parts in movies where characters are either good, bad, or grey.

Every villain needs her story told.

I don't exactly relate to grey characters.

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.