Character-Driven Story Quotes

When I'm making a big movie, I miss and appreciate all the subtleties that come with making a smaller film that is more intimate, more personal.

I'd love to do a movie with females in it, and not necessarily the female version of 'The Hangover,' but I'd love to. If I did it it'd star Juliette Lewis, because she's the funniest woman in the world. She's my favorite actress on the planet. If we did a character-based comedy about women, I don't see it out of my range.

I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.

I believe that every character is a setting, a world with moving parts, and on the other hand, every setting is, in fact, a character - a living breathing thing with personality and backstory. The way stories come to life, at least for me, is when these elements commune in relationship to one another.

It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.

'Ten Year' was probably - I might say 'Ten Year' was my favorite filming experience of anything I ever worked on. It was totally different from 'Moneyball' in that it was a small budget, independent movie. It had a giant ensemble of actors, all of whom were basically working for free.

It's very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

'Star Wars' novels that focus on a single character are few and far between.

I would love to do anything from a really gritty, interesting, indie type film, to that commercial, bigger stuff.

I don't want to play the lead and look like a hero. I am open to do character roles; what is the harm in it?

I think I'm a character actress at heart, and I think my work is character work for the most part. I'm not the lead of any films - which is not to say that I wouldn't ever want to be; it is just to say that hasn't been my path.

I've never considered myself a leading man, don't look like one, don't want to be one.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

I loved that it was about human relationships and then it was a mystery without falling into the trap of a thriller per se, because it pulled you in through people rather than through events or effects.

There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.

I've worked on some movies that get put in the horror shelf on the video stores, but they're really structurally like mysteries, and not so dependent on the gore factor, so they really don't need to be R-rated movies.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I'm looking for little movies that are good instead of picking scripts in pursuit of superstardom.

The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first 'Spiderman' game as well as 'Fantastic Four,' and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.

We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.