Character Interaction Quotes

Loving movies myself, I know when I see a film with someone with a strong persona, it's hard to overlay another character on top of that.

That's what we do in the WWE: we tell stories; we're characters. We go into the ring, and my character is telling a story in the ring against another character.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

The first thing I read was of my character on the phone talking to Sydney's fiance. Though short, it was so beautifully written, and it made me laugh. I thought if I wanted to play a character, this would be it.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

This isn't a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It's not really sports. It's entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can't create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.

Oh, yeah - 'The Good Wife' was a lot of fun to do. It was a short scene I did, but Josh Charles was very nice, and Julianna Margulies was so sweet. We had a very good time.

I remember meeting the princesses at Disney World and getting their autographs.

The thing I respond to the most is just great writing, interesting characters. I like to think that there is something fun about playing a character that has a lot of authority in her own life.

'You're Dionysus,' I said. 'The god of wine.' Mr. D rolled his eyes. 'What do they say these days, Grover? Do the children say "Well duh!"?' 'Y-yes, Mr. D.' 'Then, "Well, duh!" Percy Jackson. Did you think I was Aphrodite, perhaps?' 'You're a god.' 'Yes, child.' 'A god. You.'

You always have three movies that you have to reduce into one. You have the screenplay. And then, you do a workshop and you add more scenes. And then, on the day you shoot, there's more action and interaction. It's like a souffle. It has a tendency to just grow and explode, and it's just too long.

In 'Tom and Jerry,' there was hardly any dialogue at all. It was all action. It required a great many drawings to make.

When we shot the pilot for 'Voyager,' Armin Shimmerman, who played Quark on 'Deep Space Nine,' was very gracious and outgoing about preparing us for these personal appearances. Still, nothing really can prepare you for the first time when you walk out on stage and 2,000 people in a room stand up and applaud simply because you're there.

The identity of Studio Ghibli movies are how the characters move. They move like live, real people.

I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.

For me, drama is conflict.

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.

What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.

When you're on set and you professionally listen to what the other actors have to say, then the emotion is naturally evoked.

I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There's an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself - and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame.

It's a different way of getting across an emotion. You're trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.

You cannot judge the performance of an actor in isolation. A performance becomes good because of so many factors, including the other actors.

First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.

It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.

One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.