Character-Driven Quotes

You would not believe the amount of feedback I've gotten over people binge-watching The West Wing. Most of them have binge-watched it countless times.

Badlapur' is a drama, a character-driven story. It is not so much about plot.

I'd like to be in anything that tells a good story and has an interesting character.

I would love to do a small indie comedy, like a Wes Anderson movie or, like, an ensemble comedy like 'The Royal Tenenbaums' or 'Little Miss Sunshine.' I like comedies like that, that have a lot of heart and are about family dynamics.

I've tried to create a comedy that doesn't look like any other comedy. Maybe traditionally in TV there has been a kind of formula that says, 'Oh, comedy has to look this way; it has to look super bright.' But the way we shoot 'Insecure' is motivated by the mental state of each of our characters.

It's really hard to find just a simple character-driven drama, outside of a genre, that was available to direct, except for on TV.

'Leaving Las Vegas' is a relationship; 'Dead Man Walking' is a relationship, and they're very contained movies. They're compressed and not in wide open spaces all over the place.

Leadership is much less about what you do, and much more about who you are. If you view leadership as a bag of manipulative tricks or charismatic behaviors to advance your own personal interest, then people have every right to be cynical. But if your leadership flows first and foremost from inner character and integrity of ambition, then you can justly ask people to lend themselves to your organization and its mission.

I like stories that begin with characters. I like to be engaged and moved by the characters in the story. I want to be moved. I want to leave the cinema and think about what I've seen. My sensibility is quite eclectic and it doesn't matter if they are small or large films, I just want to make good films.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

What's true of the Marvel brand is that we're not as invested in the cape and the cowl as we are in the individuals. That goes all the way back to Stan Lee, from the very beginning.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

I love character-driven, well-written, great storytelling types of films, and I think that 'My Cousin Vinny' just hit the nail on the head with everything. It's one of those movies that, if I'm flipping through the channels, no matter what part it's on, I can watch it. It's just one of my favorites.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

'Star Trek' is a 'Wagon Train' concept - built around characters who travel to worlds 'similar' to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which become our stories. Their transportation is the cruiser 'S.S. Yorktown,' performing a well-defined and long-range Exploration-Science-Security mission which helps create our format.

Generally, we try not to write down to kids. We really just try to write a visual, character-driven cartoon that has a lot of slapstick and really appeals to us. I guess we are just lucky that other adults find that amusing, too.

With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.

I realized, because I've been doing these very small, character-driven movies, that this is entertainment. This is so much fun.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.

When you're writing a 25-minute episode that can be anything, sometimes you just start with a character, and you let them walk into the room. Then you let your instinct guide you. That's how we made art when we were 15 years old. And that's so fun to us.