Sam Esmail Quotes

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

But in film you always watch situations or stories that you really have no relation to. A lot of times just because there's no personal connection doesn't mean you can't connect with the film or the characters in the film.

In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

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.

When a family film is done well, there's a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

If people don't connect to Eric Carter's struggles, I'm sure they'll find a character in this series to connect to. That's ultimately what it's about for me.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I've always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors. Where you can be in their shoes and therefore be more involved if they're people that you recognize.

When I create a character, particularly my central character, I want someone who is interesting and feels real and who might have quite a few virtues but is unlikely to be perfect, who hasn't necessarily made all the right choices.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

When I approach any script, I always try to find what I would relate to most in it.

There are characters that become more popular as we fall in love with them.

You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.