George Tillman Jr. Quotes

I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

If you give a character room to breathe, they come alive.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

I love spending time researching a character and reading about them.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

Detailing and backstories are so important; only they draw you into the life of a character.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.