Jonathan Nolan Quotes

I've had such an incredible arc, so it made sense to me, creatively, that we've told Laurel's story. It has come to an end in the 'Arrow'-verse.

You really have to create everything in order to come away with a full human being on screen.

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

No, I won't ever write another 'Lily Bard.' I said everything I had to say about Lily.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

I used to watch dailies and felt I had to keep on top of the character, but I don't feel that any more.

I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.

I left it entirely in the hands of the 'Emmerdale' team and had no input into how Andy would leave. I put my full trust in them to come up with a way for him to leave that was fitting for the character.

I think if you've held onto a character for several years and then you're getting rid of that character, it's going to be traumatic.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

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

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

I think we make the movies, initially, with the one movie in mind. But we do love the characters, and so we kind of miss the characters when the movie is over. But I think what happens is, every now and then you realize there's more to tell, or an idea comes up.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

I always like to play roles where I either love the character or think that it's a story that I can tell better than anyone else. There are always reasons for me to do whatever I do.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

The best of all kinds of movies are character-driven, and I definitely don't want to lose sight of why Derek and I started to write movies together in the first place.

The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.