Timeless Characters Quotes

I felt 'Gone with the Wind' would last five years, and it's lasted over 70 and into a new millennium. There is a special place in my heart for that film and Melanie. She was a remarkable character - a loving person - and because of that, she was a happy person. And Scarlett, of course, was not.

It's funny what [producer Richard Zanuck said about even though you can't quite place when the book or the story came into your life, and I do vaguely remember roughly five years old reading versions of Alice in Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone knows the characters and they're very well-defined characters, which I always thought was fascinating. Most people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and reference them.

Superman has been around for so long; he's been around for, what, eight decades now? And he goes through these different eras where different aspects of who he is get emphasized.

I did speak out about celebrities because I thought it was appalling. I thought that if the cartoon became popular, it was only going to last as long as the career of the people who are in it. They didn't make up timeless voices. They used their own. They brought nothing to the table, in other words. There was no alchemy. That's why a cartoon was so alluring, was that a human being went into a place and created this supernatural sound, or whatever sound it was supposed to be that was totally unlike their own, and did it in multiples.

I never saw a Laurel & Hardy movie in a theater when they first ran, when I was a kid. But as a child, I knew who they were, and knew the culture of it, what they meant.

With Marvel and DC, you're working with their pre-established fictional universes and characters. At those places, you're working with characters who will outlive you and maybe your children and your childern's children. Batman will outlive me, Spider-Man will outlive me, the Avengers will outlive me, and so it goes.

I love 'Batman.' I love the Adam West 'Batman.' I love the animated 'Batman.' The character of Batman can encompass any interpretation, which is what makes that character so brilliant and why it's survived so many different media.

What sets 'Archie' apart from the many, many times I've reworked and rebooted long-standing characters is that this time, it was really scary.

If only I could step back into the time of old movies, if only I could be given the opportunity to do what Katharine Hepburn did or what Rosalind Russell did. Those kinds of characters, that kind of patter, that kind of language, that kind of script. They don't exist any more.

It is so gratifying for me the degree to which the Minions have been embraced. It's almost unprecedented in the CG animated world. It's amazing. That's really all a creator hopes for, that their characters grow beyond them. It's like Darth Vader and Batman. They've gotten bigger than their creators.

Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.

The whole point of having great characters is the opportunity to explore them more deeply with time, re-interpreting them for each new age.

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

If I were to do a sequel, it would be with Sophie as a very old woman and The BFG the same, a bit like that 'Let the Right One' in film.

Superman is pretty much the way he was - you know - what he's always been. A lot of the Marvel characters are products of their time. I think Batman, as a character, has been able to adapt; he's pretty malleable.

Maybe this is because I'm a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.

Laurel and Hardy are among my strongest influences, and I think they're perfect examples of two naive, kid-like characters that are still funny today. In fact, they're a lot like SpongeBob and Patrick, walking around in their own little world and causing a fine mess.

We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic.

Particularly with the plays I choose, they're good parts, and they're parts that have been around long before a bad actor played them, and will be around long after I play them. Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in. To keep these characters static - like Superman was invented in the '30s, Wonder Woman in the '40s - if they were still operating under those kinds of constraints, they'd die. These pop cultures, just like Greek myths, they have to reflect the time their stories are being told. That's what makes them relevant.

It's interesting to see how people bring different things to them. I think it comes down to the universal appeal of the Holmes-Watson that they can keep being discovered in different ways.

I always think the great parts outlive the actors that play them and that's a stage tradition, that goes back hundreds of years and it should be that way.