Chris Claremont Quotes

Content is getting its due respect. Our audience wants to see characters on screen and want to see actors play new roles, adapt different body language.

It does not matter to me how many dialogues I have in the film or the screen time. It is all about story and characters for me.

I have always believed that if a film has only two characters, but they do not make any sense, then the film's meaningless.

The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.

Some of my most enjoyable moments as a writer have come while conjuring a meet cute.

I am a very simple man. I love normality, and I love normal people. I love to eat normal food. It's how I grew up.

In a movie, you're just passive; you're just watching a story that is told to you. But in games, I saw that you could be the main protagonist: you could be in the shoes of the hero and make the decisions.

What people don't realise is that it is the script which plays the most important factor in making or breaking a chemistry.

My character is such an entertaining character that it is a whole other element to the show, so once they put me and Carmella together it was like, okay, now I have something to do.

The point of remaking 'Straw Dogs' is not to replicate the philosophies of Sam Peckinpah at all. What made that film singular was the attitude that he brought to the characters. Oddly enough, that's the one thing that I really wanted to change.

Early on, many years ago when we started 'Avatar,' the executive that we were working with said to make the sad scenes sadder, the funny scenes funnier, the scary scenes scarier. That was kind of permission to do what we felt comfortable with.

I'm a big fan of rehearsal. I'm famous for pulling the cast together, not so much to formally rehearse, but just to run the lines. My theory of acting is that it takes all your attention just to stay in the moment, and keep your attention on the other person, and get him to do what you want him to do.

You learn the values that are inherent in the scene that the writer has written. You learn about who you as a character are in relation to those others who are working with you within that scene.

As an actor, you generally want to see the other actor's face.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.

I still do a form of sense memory. It honestly depends on the job. It depends on the other people you're working with, how the other actor works. It's take a little from here, take a little from there.

But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

They [my characters]speak to me all the time! In fact some of them never shut up!

I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.

In a given scene I may know nothing more than how it's supposed to end, most of the time not even that. Scenes are improvised. A character does or says something, and with as much spontaneity and schizophrenia as I can muster, another character responds. In this way, everything I write is spontaneous chain reaction and I'm running around playing leapfrog in my brain trying to "be" all my people.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Never open your story with a character thinking, I advise my students. As a further precaution, don’t put a character in a room alone – create a friend, a bystander, a genie, for God’s sake, any sentient creature with whom your main character can converse, perhaps argue or, better yet, engage in some action. If a person is out and doing, it’s more likely that something interesting might happen to her or him. Shut up in a room with only his thoughts for company well, that way lies fictional disaster.

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.