Michael Eklund Quotes

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

The challenge was the opportunity. When I read the first draft of Steve Kloves' fabulous adaptation - I hadn't read [Michael] Chabon's book at that time - what I was immediately captivated by was this group of characters that were at once so engaging and so messed up.

My job is to bring to life the character, not to put the words on the paper.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

The predominant difference between television and film is the pace to which you work, but the development of the character or the process for playing the character isn't necessarily different.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

I don't act in the way other actresses act, in terms of building or creating a character. I don't transform myself into the role, I invest myself in the role.

When you have a script, and you're discussing what it can be, and who going to play what role, that's a kind of like a fantasy football game. You can imagine these different dream teams interpreting these characters that only exist in your head.

Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.

What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters.

I've sort of dealt with the characters' lives more; particularly the women characters.

My favorite part is the preparation because you read on the page, you get this character.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

It's down to the actors to show the writers the potential of the character.

I think I approached 'Captain Phillips' as I would any project. I always try to understand the story, characters, and themes as deeply as possible and then work as hard as I can to make those things come to life.

Every filmmaker has his own vision, and when they write a film or characters, they see certain people in those characters.

I know that my way of tackling a character is very different.

There's just a deeper level of sophistication in the writing of female characters on TV.

I don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.

Character is plot, plot is character.

I really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.