Victor Garber Quotes

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

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.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

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

I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

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.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

You have to look for story. That's obvious. If that's not on the page, you can forget it. But I also read whatever character I'm being offered. And if you can cut them out without it affecting the story, then I say no straight away.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

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

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond 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.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.