Andrew Gower Quotes

Well, I think it can be quite helpful to be working on a character who actually existed, historically. Of course, you might have material to study and help you create the character.

I always tend to see, right after reading the script, the character and how I want to play it. I guess that's sort of most of the work, preparing for the role, but almost the creation of the character seems to go on as I read through the script.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.

When you're portraying someone that really existed, there has to be a time as an actress where you leave reality and move into the fantasy world so you can do your job of creating a character.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

What's nice about playing somebody real is that generally there's more information about them, so a lot of the questions that you'd otherwise have to make up the answers to are already there.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Sometimes you have a period piece where you have to research around it but, if the writers have done their homework well enough, the information is all in the script.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

Actors have seven tracks going in their minds: They've got all the research they've done for the part, then they have whatever the director asked them to do, then they've got what the departments like special effects need them to do.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

I'm always nervous taking on a period role because it's difficult to research - you can't observe it, go out and see it. But it's satisfying because eventually you think, 'I got there.'

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

Everyone relates differently to contemporary stuff. They rely on you to do the research for a period film.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

There's a certain amount of pressure that comes from playing real people. It's a pressure to deliver something fair and right to the real person and any living relatives. But generally, it's a joy, as you get to target your interest on a particular era.

Many times, when a director reads a script and wants somebody who says 'Far out', then they let me do what I want with it and that's usually more interesting for an actor.

I'll read a script maybe twice, but I'll think about the role more than I'll rehearse lines.

In every film, whether it's a fictional character or not, you create an idea of the character and for me I always do a bad impersonation to start with.

All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

It's obvious that if you're going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they're in and use as little or as much as necessary.