Character Purpose Quotes

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

If somebody is in a story, they need to be there for a reason, and not just to set up somebody else's story.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

You see so many earnest characters in movies all the time, everyone has a purpose.

We want our villains and antagonists to have distinct motivations.

Characters are born from necessity.

I don't even mind playing a bimbo or a silly girl, as long as it isn't stereotyped and there's a reason for that character to be part of the story.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

I didn't want [actress] just to be a woman standing at the window, waving hello and goodbye to men as they came and went in the world that they were struggling through. I wanted her to have a true function.

Part of the fun of writing is having messages. Without them, it's all gunfights and car chases, and none of it means anything.

If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you're a hack.

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop.

Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs.

I wouldn't do really gratuitous nudity. When I was in my late teens, you'd read stuff and be like, 'That character serves no purpose except being naked', so that would not be something I'd want to do. It's pointless for me.

TV and film both attract me equally. In both, you do search for a role that would be enjoyable to do, that has a great storyline and then, secondly, you look at the cast and the crew - are they respectable? How I look at it is my character - has the character got enough substance? It can't just be a one faced character, which is there to fill a gap. He has to have a purpose, so if it ticks all of those boxes then generally it's a good choice.

Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.

What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing.

Emotions serve characters' purposes. That is their motivation.

Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.