The way I prepare is through script analysts and back story. I create back story for a character based on script analysts, filling in as many details as possible. I also do a lot of research.
Most of the names in my books have secondary meaning. Sometimes they foreshadow; sometimes they tell you about the character's origin or back story.
I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.
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 don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.
For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the back-story.
I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.
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.
We wanted it to be that you could go to the comic shop and read about the back story of 'Pacific Rim' and the drama inherent in it.
I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.
I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.
You have formal rehearsal, a lot of things you don't have in movies - which is, you have to formally rehearse. You have to know your back story, discuss it, and almost everybody onstage has to know each other's [story], so that when it comes time to actually do it, you can throw it all away. That's the way I like to - and I didn't realize until very recently - that's the way I like to prepare for movies.
It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place.
Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.
In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.
I think the thing that made this stand out the most was just the fact that there's a lot more character to these characters. We see their back stories and we see their present situations, and that was a lot more interesting than just the regular procedural with four heads standing around a body, spelling it out for you. It's a lot more of a roller coaster ride.
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
