Tom Cruise Quotes

Tom [Cruise] is a great producer himself. He's got great sense of story. It's always great to have the perspective of the person who's playing the character in your film.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

I always think once you have the lead protagonist, you cast around that character.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

We always joke now like, you know, the more experienced we get making stuff, we're like, "Never leave set without a shot of each of our lead characters driving in the car looking happy, looking moderately blank and looking sad." Because we know we're going to need these things.

In a great horror movie, you've gotta have some character development and you've gotta set some of your people up and you've gotta have a little back story going. You've gotta take that time for exposition.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

I try to be true to the characters that I've created and sometimes I disagree with them, but their opinions about the story and the characters really matter to me.

I definitely want to do films. To see a character out from beginning to end in a matter of a hundred somewhat pages and then move on to the next role, is fascinating.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations.

I've had a little Hollywood experience, and there's nothing like the Disney story experience.

I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you're constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.

I'm very interested in starting to produce, and direct, and have an umbrella over an entire project in the future. I'd like to have control over what the characters do. I think as an actor, you get a little too caught up in the moment-to-moment, beat-to-beat stuff to have perspective.

Any jokes I make I try to make sure it's on story and helps the characters and makes sense with the movie.

You're trying to bring a character to an audience, and tell stories. That's what we're all trying do.

The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.

One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.

It was the first time I worked with Matthew McConaughey [in the True Detective].They're fun guys [with Woody Harrelson]. They don't take life at all too seriously, but yet they take their work very seriously. And both of them are just so committed to character and the story.

When you're in sync with the director, on the type of movie you want to make, the arc of the characters, how the characters intertwine and interact, plotlines and story, and things like that, it really makes a difference.

I personally adore origin stories - they're so intriguing, learning what shaped and formed a character.

A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.