Samantha Mathis Quotes

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

I think I try to look at all my films and break them down because, at the end of the day, it's about creating characters that you like.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

A new character is like bringing a new human being into your life.

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

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

When I create a character, it happens in layers. The more I write and revise, the better I understand the characters.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

I like to take a character and develop it.

I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested in my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.