Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

If you cared enough about your characters, what happened to them was interesting... it's important to care about them, about who they are and what they do...I don't really care whose side they are on, and they can be monstrous on the outside or, worse, on the inside, but you still have to want to spend time with them.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

I don't know whether it's audiences or filmmakers who want characters to be likable today, but I don't think actors are afraid of their characters being unlikable.

For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

I've always been interesting in characters that challenge people and who are not always that easy to like.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

Ultimately, if the character is interesting and you said that before: It doesn't matter if it's likable. That's really what it is. If they interest you. If the context in which the characters are set interests you then I think then you're pulled in by it.

I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation.

One of things that drives me nuts is you rarely get bad guys who are written very well.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

I talk about Breaking Bad being the most brilliant show ever, and even minor characters have subtle nuances and are fully drawn.

The deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.

Really a bad guy is more interesting, dramatically, than the good guy.

I've always been way more attracted to playing imposing characters than the hero. I've always been more intrigued by Iago in Shakespeare than playing Romeo. That was always boring to me.

On the other side, if Im playing a good guy, then he has some problems too. Thats what makes people interesting, in life and in fiction.

I have a knack of making villainous people a little bit sympathetic, a bit of fun on screen.

To me sympathy for a character has little to do with how morally upstanding or wicked they are. All that really matters for me is how human and interesting they are. I happen to be drawn to characters who operate under intense internal pressure, which often comes from some deep psychological conflict.

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

To a large extent, people's interest in the character is the mystery of the character.

My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.

Generally, the bigger the budget, the less interesting the characters become.

Somehow we allow, if a character goes to the dark side, if we're hooked into that character - I'm obsessed with Peaky Blinders. Those characters are awful, and yet you root for them. You love them! Same with Breaking Bad. That's not as easy in a feature.

When I sat down with the creators of the show [Longmire], back when we were first starting to do the pilot, Branch was not that interesting on the page. What really sold me on the show and the character was their vision for him. It took the whole first season to flesh him out.

I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me.