George Perez Quotes

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.

I am inspired just by the way a scene can be interpreted by the actors. It can make a huge difference on the type of music that you write. It's best for me if I don't work at all on a project until the movie is shot and I have some sort of edit in front of me.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

Sometimes, you start with the drawing and then the gag comes to you in the middle of it. That is when you start working on the solution of the gag, which is composition, placing, equilibrium, and character design.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

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.

Their films would probably be better if they'd seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

In the case of 'Sweet Tooth,' and in the case of a lot of stuff I do, it all starts with the image. It may be something I sketch in my sketchbooks - something that reoccurs in the sketchbooks. Eventually, a character or story line starts to grow out of that.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

I always collect a bunch of images for every film that I do, that reminds me of an essence of the character, or the time that they live in, or what they're experiencing.