Quotes & Sayings About Characters In Movies

[Hollywood] studios are handing out money to make independent films now, but they all want the same thing. They want the style and the deadpan delivery of RESERVOIR DOGS or FARGO and so they imitate those movies. They want PULP FICTION, but they get it all wrong! They get the detachment, but that's it. And then it's all about style, and in the end what do you learn about the characters? Nothing. You learn you wasted two hours. — Stanley Tucci

I love being in space. I love being challenged by great roles that a company like Marvel creates amazing movies that no only give audiences an adventure but also give us as artists an opportunity for us to be challenged to embody amazing, multilayered characters. — Zoe Saldana

Not only these were new kinds of stories, they were being told with a new kind of formal structure. [...] The result was a storytelling architecture you could picture as a colonnade - each episode a brick with its own solid, satisfying shape, but also part of a season-long arc that, in turn, would stand linked to other seasons to form a coherent, freestanding work of art. [...] The new structure allowed huge creative freedom: to develop characters over long stretches of time, to tell stories over the course of fifty hours or more, the equivalent of countless movies. — Brett Martin

I've played all kinds of historical characters, but they are stuck in movies that aren't their movies. — Colm Feore

There will always be a slight difference between the reel and the real. Even my family might know 99 per cent about me, but there will be this one per cent about me that nobody will ever know. Being in this profession, I am fine with biopics or movies inspired by real-life-characters. — Vidya Balan

I watched so many comic book movies where the actors weren't as built as the characters in the book. It made me mad because they didn't look right. — Joe Manganiello

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting. — Joel Edgerton

People love to talk about how the '70s are the only time they made movies about characters, and adult movies, and complicated people. But in the '80s, they got away with some of those too. — Elisabeth Shue

Whether it's movies or television that I've directed, or characters that I've played, I'm just always fascinated by the moral ambiguity inherent in life. — Tony Goldwyn

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up. — Tom Lehrer

Watching movies (Titanic, Flirting with Disaster, Mannequin, Thelma and Louise, Rushmore, The Goonies, She's Having a Baby, it mattered very little) was a kind of prayer: She knew the characters as well as she knew herself, as well as she knew anything there was to know, and she could chart and rechart their movements and secrets and misunderstandings endlessly, reflecting in any number of new permutations on all of it, each time. Again and again. They were acquaintances - people she'd known her whole life and understood well, people incapable of letting her down by changing or disappearing or offering up the unexpected. The League of Their Own tears were purely for catharsis. When she was done she would reemerge, reborn. She would make new mistakes. Or maybe none at all. Okay, — Elisa Albert

It's difficult to make a movie about a complicated, non-traditional female character. We see a lot more movies with male characters who are at that point in their lives, but not that many about females. — Megan Griffiths

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort. — Ralph Fiennes

Sometimes the characters I find the most compelling are in independent movies. With independent scripts people can take more challenges. — Brittany Snow

In movies and TV, we tend to fall into tropes about how characters might get out of problems. But when you look at real life, you realize that there is a lot of drama of not being able to get out of the problems. — Matthew Weiner

I was lucky enough to be in some movies where I had powerful characters or I got to be the president on TV for a little while. Very short administration. — Geena Davis

The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to. — Jesse Eisenberg

It's seldom that you find great moments in television. Usually you remember - in 'Breaking Bad' or any of these other great shows - you remember situations or characters. Not moments. But I have to say, I can make the same argument for mainstream movies, which have bad narratives and also no memorable moments. — Alfonso Cuaron

After 'Prom Night' I did two movies where I was playing a prostitute. I gravitate towards characters that have some sort of inner turmoil or some sort of character arc. That's the great thing about acting, so many different things and being really diverse in your choices. — Brittany Snow

The hardest thing to get right is to figure out how to bring all those characters together, and to fulfill the promise of The Avengers. They really set a very high bar for themselves because you've been setting this coalition up, for these five movies, and they better deliver. And in my opinion, they thoroughly deliver. — Clark Gregg

The most important thing to having a long career, as an actor, is diversity and being able to play different types of characters in different types of movies. I want to keep acting, all my life. In order to do that, I think it is important to go and do the bigger tentpole box office movies, and then also do more character roles. — Josh Hutcherson

I think there's an essential problem in movies and TV that I think a lot of people experience now: Audiences are way more interested in the actors than the characters that they're playing. It's a strange thing. — Michael Angarano

You know how they do that effect in movies, where they make it look like you have a twin, but it's really just the same actor playing both characters in the scene? I knew this would be the best route, but I just wasn't comfortable dressing as a woman, so I had to hire other actors. — Zach Braff

Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be. — Stephen King

In a time of feminism taken into account, there's a sense that if one's choices
even in something as minor as a favorite chill-out show
can't be rationalized, they should probably be kept quiet. As with most-feminist movies and most-feminist underpants, this suggests that feminism is a unvarying foundation of a larger system. It suggests feminism is something that either is or is not okay to consume, rather than a sense through which creators and audiences see stories, characters, and communication. — Andi Zeisler

What I look for in a script is the plot point and whether they're strong, obviously, or not, whether the characters are rich or not, and if I can do justice to the character or not. Some movies you look at and the script is so bad that no one can do anything with the script. — Larenz Tate

I've seen trans people in movies and TV shows, but judging by how unrealistic and shitty bi characters tend to be, I'm gonna assume I know nothing. So what's okay for me to ask? — Meredith Russo

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.' — Henry Louis Gates

In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing. It makes sense. But I had always admired filmmakers who made movies that didn't sound like them at all. — Kevin Smith

It's sad that women characters have lost so much ground in popular movies. Didn't 'Thelma and Louise' prove that women want to see women doing things on film? Thelma and Louise were in a classic car; they were being chased by cops; they shot up a truck - and women loved it. — Robin Quivers

The power of movies lies in the fact that it enables the viewer to enter the reality, to some extent, of the characters. — Eckhart Tolle

What always leads me in terms of my movies are characters. — Tony Scott

To me, the best zombie movies aren't the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society ... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too ... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness. — Robert Kirkman

The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable. — Damien Chazelle

I've asked myself that a thousand times over and I'm no closer to an answer now than I was when it began. I think that's why I always loved movies so much. In a movie, everything has to make sense. The characters always have to have motivation. Good, solid motivation for everything they do. They can't be a dickhead without reason. If someone turns on a character, they have to have a hardcore, believable reason for it. Unfortunately, in real life you don't. People turn on each other for anything from catching a constipated look on your face when you had gas and thinking it was directed at them, to not liking the brand of shoes you're wearing. People are sick. (Aiden) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Hope and Crosby made seven 'Road' movies, starting in 1940 with 'Road to Singapore.' The movies were always about Crosby and Hope fleeing America and finding Dorothy Lamour in some exotic location. Bob's character was cocky and cowardly; Bing's character was smooth and unruffled. They were great characters - lousy, lovable guys. — Frank Oz

Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle's movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. "They're so joyless," he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle's sensibility had been even before the blast - it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. "But they are very acclaimed," his mother had said reverently. — Karan Mahajan

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. — Roger Ebert

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. — Steve Erickson

I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint Eastwood' or whoever. — Sharlto Copley

I'm not a big fan of violent movies, it's not something I like to watch. And it's not my aim or goal to make a violent movie. My characters are very important, so when I'm trying to depict a certain character in my movie, if my character is violent, it will be expressed that way in the film. You cannot really deny what a character is about. To repeat, my movie end up becoming violent, but I don't start with the intent of making violent movies. — Takashi Miike

My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath,' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. — Jane Fonda

I'm not suggesting at all that we take away all of the characters' vices. I am suggesting that this particular vice is so insidious, so nefarious, and so deadly that simply by glamorizing it or poisoning our young adults, and I think it's a very separate category, but in no way am I suggesting that we move on from banning smoking in movies to banning drinking, or whatever else we want to do. — Joe Eszterhas

I think there are a lot more relationship scenes in my movies that people tend to overlook. A lot of scenes really feel real and are about the characters. — Jan De Bont

I never wanted there to be any moment in my movies when something would happen and the audience would cheer, like sometimes that happens in certain types of horror movies. I was never a fan of that, I wasn't looking for 'inventive' kills and I even hate that word because it's like, if you have these characters screaming or crying in pain I don't think anyone should be jumping out of their seat cheering. It should be horrible and you should feel sick watching it because that's what it is, sick. — Rob Zombie

I, as a fan of numerous TV shows and movies, know that people mess up. The characters that we love are not always going to act in the ways that we want them to. That's what makes them interesting. — Rita Volk

Instead he thinks up the worst ending imaginable: Hemingway has Catherine die from
hemorrhaging after their child is stillborn. It is the most torturous ending I have ever
experienced and probably will ever experience in literature, movies, or even television.
I am crying so hard at the end, partly for the characters, yes, but also because Nikki
actually teaches this book to children. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to
expose impressionable teenagers to such a horrible ending. Why not just tell high school
students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing? — Matthew Quick

Most movies shot in Italian don't even bother to record the sound. In fact, sometimes when Fellini works, he doesn't even know what the dialogue is going to be, and he simply has his characters count from 1 to 10, knowing he will loop in their dialogue later. — Sean Connery

A lot of times in movies, especially in sequels, the characters become caricatures and just sort of improv machines and joke machines, rather than people you can actually connect to. — Hayden Schlossberg

'90210' was looking at teenagers from a perspective that hadn't really been seen on television, though it had been seen in movies like some John Hughes films. I don't know if you want to say '90210' was real, but what the characters were going through was relatable - in a very glamorous environment. — Darren Star

I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed. — Drew Goddard

The thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human. They're full of flaws as much as they are full of heroics. I think the reason that people love them and hate them so much is because, in some way, they always see a mirror of themselves in them, and you can always understand them on some level. Sometimes it's a terrifyingly dark mirror that's held up. — Keira Knightley

The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail? — Kyle Smith

I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters - it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. — Miranda July

I don't feel that I'm making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch movie on an iPhone, I'm not going to stop them, especially if they're paying for it, but I don't recommend it. I think it's dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they're not visible. I'm trying to make an epic. — James Cameron

I've done movies that have mostly feminine characters and elements, and I think that both 'Heathers' and 'Truth About Cats and Dogs' are, in their own weird ways - they're different ends of the girl movie spectrum, but they're very much centered around the female characters, and I like those movies, and I like working with good actresses. — Michael Lehmann

But see, that's the thing about movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. You read a book, and you see a picture of the characters and the scenes in your mind. You don't have that with a movie. It's all either up there on the screen laid out for you, or it isn't there at all. — Laurie Viera Rigler

If you have superheroes or characters that exist in the same world, and you're doing movies of them, wouldn't it be fun to put a couple of them together in one movie? Audiences love that. It's a natural thing to do that. — Stan Lee

Whatever is being investigated, created or produced now, in movies or TV, needs to consider the context in which it is being distributed. It's not a vacuum. There are certain universal themes of love, conflict, loyalty or family that are everlasting and that need to be presented in a way that makes it feel relevant, even if it's a period piece. You need to consider what context that film, that story and those characters are being seen in. — J.J. Abrams

I quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them. — Susanne Bier

Generally my instinct is to not do biographical movies. I want to build characters and not be locked into playing a part in history. — Nicolas Cage

One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that. — Neil Gaiman

'Avatar' was gorgeous. There are good stories in there, but when used in other movies they're similar to those violent video games. Characters using deadly weapons. The children follow these movies. — Louis Gossett Jr.

I think we make the movies, initially, with the one movie in mind. But we do love the characters, and so we kind of miss the characters when the movie is over. But I think what happens is, every now and then you realize there's more to tell, or an idea comes up. — Dan Scanlon

I don't really mind playing tabloid monster. I always liked those characters in the old movies. — Nick Denton

The representation of gay characters on screen is important for us all to think about because there are sadly too few representations of gay characters on screen in mainstream cinema. If Marvel starts making movies about gay superheroes, then we'll be in a really great place. We're not at that place. — Graham Moore

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image. — Eric Kripke

I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant. — Paul Bloom

It's a convention, but in horror movies the female characters usually tend to believe easier in a supernatural event. — Fede Alvarez

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches
it reaches!
for the purity of death. — Frank Lentricchia

There's something strange about theater. My characters consistently demonize elitism, but of course it's taking place in a theater where only so many people can see it. I've been in silly popcorn movies - the kind of thing that as an actor you might feel embarrassed about - but those movies reach many more people. — Jesse Eisenberg

I really feel that's part of why audiences go to movies now is to take you to a world you have no access to, whether it's the world of Avengers or Middle-earth or bars in Boston you would be afraid to go into. You see characters there - they aren't hobbits but they're close. — Ben Affleck

To figure out what people think, look at the stories that they tell. We might never get away from the image of Sheldon from 'The Big Bang Theory' breaking down in the middle of the store, not knowing which console to buy, but we can see in TV and movies how regular characters are more and more starting to play games. — Rob Manuel

Playing those one-dimensional characters is actually really difficult because you're not dealing with somebody you would ever really know. I don't think anybody here could imagine actually knowing Cindy Campbell from Scary Movies. So, in a way, your job is so much easier when you're playing a person that you really understand and that seems very relatable. I think I was coming to a place in my career where I was like, "I'd like to do something a little more rewarding." — Anna Faris

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint ... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need. — Meg Tilly

When we go to the movies, we identify with the characters we see. That's why we go to the movies; we have a voyeuristic experience; we have an out of the body experience. The screen is more real than our thoughts are at the moment we are looking at the film and we place ourselves in the place of the people on the screen, and when they behave nobly, it makes us feel noble, when they are sad and when they have lost love, we feel sad; we can identify with that. — Roger Ebert

A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own. — Bruno Heller

The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters seriously. — Garth Ennis

The movies and TV shows I like to watch tend to put their characters in situations where they have to dig deeper. — Kristin Bauer Van Straten

I try to be eclectic in my choice of films. If I've done anything that's intentional in my career, it's to try to do as many different types of characters and as many different types of genres of movies that I can. — Dennis Quaid

In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film. — Joshua Leonard

In the movies, you want a good story and characters that are honest, but you are also looking for a good director who can lead the ship. That's how we look at business. Everybody has a great idea for a start-up, and so do their relatives, and they tell me, 'You gotta build it.' I say, 'I have to believe in it.' — Ashton Kutcher

A lot of the main characters in horror movies are outsiders as well, so that outsider syndrome reverberates within horror fans and geeky collectors. It's kind of a rallying call that brings fans and collectors together who are a little socially retarded, maybe. — Kirk Hammett

Even the spate of clearly well-intentioned films about AIDS only added to the certainty that gay characters wind up dead by the final reel. After all, in the movies, no one lives with HIV ... perhaps the ultimate stigmatization. — Robert Dunbar

I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women. — Christian Louboutin

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human. — Keira Knightley

I'm a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows. — Doug Liman

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines. — James Scott Bell

I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful. — Randall Wallace

Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation! — Molly Haskell

There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

I need to make the characters that I play in movies more accessible to audiences, more real. As an actor, you're always passive; you're not making that many choices, so when something allows you to open up a bit, you want to explore your newfound freedom. — Shu Qi

The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways. — Jeanine Basinger

It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters - it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important - I had to believe in my own story. — Miranda July

One thing I hate in movies is when the camera starts circling around the characters. I find that totally fake. — Takeshi Kitano

The ratio of male to female characters in movies has been exactly the same since 1946. So if you've ever had people say, you know, "It's better now, it's all changed, it's all different," it's not, it hasn't. Not yet. — Geena Davis

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

I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film. — Ridley Scott

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives. — Peter Capaldi

I love seeing my characters big up there and I would have liked to have reached a different public in movies from my television public. There's still a part of me that wishes that my character range could be seen on the big screen. Rather, as Rod Steiger was, because he was a big influence on me - about becoming other people and not worrying about your own glory or self esteem but sacrificing yourself to become somebody else. — David Suchet