John Lasseter Quotes

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

I always look for characters that will hopefully develop into a more powerful symbol.

Audiences are just like us as writers - we grow attached to characters. In certain ways you don't want them to change.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

I'd love to do a film. I'd love to play a character that I know the beginning, middle and end of.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

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.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

Watching something like 'Orange is the New Black' - the development of the characters is amazing. Or 'Breaking Bad' or 'Mad Men' - those shows went on for so long. You become so invested in those characters, and I think that's a pretty magic thing.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.