Viggo Mortensen Quotes

I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

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.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

When I develop a character, I usually start by creating a backstory with whatever information I have access to.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.

I get attracted to projects because of the script or the idea and the basic character.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

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

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I always do make a back story for myself, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I just like to.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.