Actor Interpretation Quotes

One of the things I find very difficult about theatre is the repetition - that something can slide away from your original intentions.

When I was filming, I imagined that Legolas was a meditative character who was very thoughtful and had a certain amount of depth to him. I started working on trying to find this focus that Legolas has, which wasn't really like me.

I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.

What I do is interpret, not create. I may add elements and do something different. That is what is so incredible about theatre. Why do we love it that there are nine Hamletsor six King Lears over two years? We love to watch a different actor attack the same material.

The Joker is a tremendous vehicle for talented actors. Cesar Romero's was a bubbly, lunatic criminal. Nicholson did him as a vain, preening manipulator. Heath's performance of the Joker was remarkable, too. His was a low-simmering crazy street clown. Joker can be played all these ways, and they're all true.

In my experience, it's usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.

Definitely when you give a script to an actor, it's like dropping a capsule in water and the fizzing starts. That's when the thing starts to live and breathe.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

I know a lot of actors who get a part and then they dissect it and they want to change it and they want to add stuff. I'm always amazed and so impressed by actors who do that.

I think that different actors bring different qualities to the Batman character. It's such a wonderful mantle to put on that I think it's a lot of fun for different actors to see how they play it.

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

A lot of times, scripts are written so the character is all one way. Even with 'Bringing Out the Dead,' the character was written a little more generic.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.

When you try to be true to the script, changes occur. A script is there to show us a certain direction. But when you actually have the actors in and you start shooting the movie, you have the actor say a line and it doesn't sound right so you change it and make it different. It's the script that gives birth to these changes and the more you try to stay true to the script, the more that happens.

I started out my career as a screenwriter and quickly discovered that adhering to a script isn't always the best way to make a film. You have to take into consideration the nuances of the characters and what the actors bring to their roles.

The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.

A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.

Most actors do that. They fill in the blanks. You don't want to play a cipher.

I'm frequently surprised, sometimes bugged off, and sometimes happy, depending on the actor. It's a fact of life that just as often as not an actor can breathe life into a line as he can destroy it by misinterpretation, and I've been blessed frequently by having good actors.

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.

You write a character, but in essence, it's just a concept of what it could be, and then actors come in and they have their own sort of interpretations and thoughts. If you respond to those and then go forward with them, then it's kind of like magic to see the idea you had become alive and in the flesh.

We improv-ed scenes that didn't happen in the movie. We improv-ed the scenes that are written in the movie without the dialogue as written. We played around a lot to try and figure out just how we could flow with what was already written in the story and how we could highlight those imbalances and those points at which we came to loggerheads.

It annoys me when people can't differentiate between the character and the actor, which is a little bit silly.