Character Engagement Quotes

The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

But I've always felt that the less you know about an actor's personal life, the more you can get involved in the story in which he's playing a character. And I don't like to see movies where you know about everything that happens behind the scenes. I can't engage in the story if I know what's going on in the actor's head.

You can, I think, have a quiet and steady protagonist and not run the risk of terminal dullness as long as exciting things happen to them and around them, and crime is the ideal genre for making this come about.

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.

There are definitely scripts I start reading, where it doesn't interest me. Maybe it'll be a good movie, but the character doesn't intrigue me.

For me, every character takes the same amount of immersion.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.

It's really important to stay engaged and involved in the character.

I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

Particularly with our games, people get involved with the characters and the world. They're going to take their time with it pretty seriously, so we need to take it even more seriously to make it good.

I know when I watch a film at this point, if I completely lose myself in the characters and the story and the world of the film I know that it's at least in my opinion, that was great. Otherwise I'm thinking: "Oh I know they were just doing A, B and C, right before they walked into the scene, then the camera was there, then they probably took the shot from this reverse close-up and moved it into this." When all of that drops away then I'm like: "Okay this was phenomenal, this was fantastic." I mean, any film or TV performance in general is probably good.

A comic book is the opposite of a cartoon. In a cartoon, you want to simplify the idea, so when they look at it at a glance, they get it. Boom. Simple. Direct to the point. But when you're drawing Groo, now it's a narrative, a story. You want the viewer to get involved in the story. You want him to feel like he's in the town to follow your main character. So I love to add lots and lots of things in it. Things that people will enjoy going back to and say, "Oh yeah, that's how a market must have looked in this fantasy world, with people selling meat here and dishes here."

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation.

If I love the character, then that's all that matters to me. It doesn't really matter what genre it is.

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it's not necessarily right for the film — you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don't stay in there with the characters and the story.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.