Biographical Representation Quotes

Playing a real person, it does add an extra level of thoughtfulness. You're portraying someone who actually existed, so instead of saying, like, 'OK, I think this would make the scene better,' it's more a question of, 'What do I think the real Jeffrey Dahmer would do?'

Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.

It's interesting to play a real-life person who has already been a character on 'Saturday Night Live.'

What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.

I wanted to be as authentic as possible because, first of all, Jean Shrimpton is still alive. And, she's interesting enough to be played accurately. I didn't need to add things.

Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.

If you are playing someone living, it is a different type of judgment. However much work you do, it is not a documentary. There will be things you can't get right, and ultimately, you have to take a leap because - you weren't there.

Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

When you're playing someone who really lived, you carry a burden, a burden to be accurate.

Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.

I wouldn't let a biopic be made on me. That's because I don't believe in them. I don't like them.

When you play a person who exists in real life, it is different than when you play fiction.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

It's challenging to play a real-life character because you know that it existed in the history and you have certain parameters to follow and stay within.

Even a writer like me, who, in 'The Firebird,' is telling the story of people who've been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.

I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.

It was a tricky part to play, because Herriot is both a fictional character and a real person.