Antony Johnston Quotes

John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.

With the police thriller genre, people come to it with an expectation. It allows you to get away with a bit of violence, edginess, darkness.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

I loved 'Homeland' - it's such an intriguing, intelligent piece of television, and I am fascinated by them making a hero and heroine that are so odd, so flawed and so complicated. It is a programme that really draws you in.

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!

To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.

I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.

Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

I'll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they're about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it's very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies - a trucker.

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.

To me, any character that is conflicted inside as well as outside of themselves is always a better role to play.

'Sound of My Voice' is an amazing film. Small, simple, yet incredibly thought provoking.

I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.

Some of my favorite shows are ones where the characters are vile and human and flawed. That's what makes me want to keep watching a show, not writers telling me how to feel about characters.

I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.

Thrillers provide the reader with a safe escape into a dangerous world where the stakes are as high as can be imagined with unpredictable outcomes. It's a perfect genre in which to explore hard issues of good and evil, a mirror that allows the reader to see both the good and not so good in themselves.

I'd like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

'Jurassic Park' movies don't fit into a specific genre. They're sci-fi adventures that also have to be funny, emotional, and scary as hell. That takes a lot of construction, but it can't feel designed.

I think 'Scarface' is a great film, but if you have a character like Tony Montana, you don't identify with him at all. I think it's very interesting instead to identify yourself with a character you don't like all the time. You can create a tension between the fiction and the viewer. You force the spectator to wonder about his actions.

'North by Northwest' was a big influence for 'The Bourne Identity.'

I'm not interested in going and doing a big, action-adventure romp with nothing to say about being a human being.