That's not to say Eddie's never done anything malicious. But he never grabbed power for power's sake. His position was gained only because he has that energy, and that's naturally where he ended up.
When I prepare for a role, I try to get inside the character's head and understand him.
I am an old journalist, so I always do a lot of research and dive deep into people's character, who they are, and their motivation.
The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.
Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!
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.
Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken
One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.
My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena.
The true worth of a soul is revealed as much by the motive it attributes to the actions of others as by its own deeds.
It's not cruelty, maybe, but a desire to understand that motivates them.
I wish medical schools helped us to analyze our healthy and unhealthy reasons for becoming doctors.
I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.
As an actor, you have to be able to take all sides as well. You have to at least be able to understand things. No bad guy looks in the mirror every morning and says, boy, I'm gonna be a real bad guy this morning. He goes after his own what he's after, just like us good guys. You kind of have to take a stand and, a lot of times, you have to take the writer's stand or the stand of the character this writer has created.
Of course, when you work on a character, you try to understand her. You feel that everything she does has a reason.
Our job as actors is to invent the things that bridge ourselves with the characters, so you have to build something if it's not there - you try and learn what makes people behave in a certain way.
It is very difficult for us to assess intent, so we have to work back from actions.
I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.
Criticism discloses that which it would fain conceal, but conceals that which it professes to disclose; it is therefore, read by the discerning, not to discover the merits of an author, but the motives of his critic.
I always regarded people who want fame with a lot of suspicion. Unless you have a product to sell, I don't know why anyone would want to be famous. I can't imagine what need that would fill.
A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.
