A Quote by Batya Gur
The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.
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I take all my characters very seriously - the main, secondary, and supporting characters. Even if they only appear once, they still need to have their own life. Some characters are absent literally but at the same time very, very present.
If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.
I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.
To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.
It's funny what [producer Richard Zanuck said about even though you can't quite place when the book or the story came into your life, and I do vaguely remember roughly five years old reading versions of Alice in Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone knows the characters and they're very well-defined characters, which I always thought was fascinating. Most people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and reference them.
It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable, given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons, we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.
I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.
I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?
I love playing characters that are bigger than life and maybe have a darker side that they present to the world. Those are good characters.
Smart writers really take their time in investing in backstories and characters. As a viewer, you have to invest in them and love them before you can chip away at what's going on more on a deeper level with secondary characters.
The only way to change the world is to change the main character of our story - the one we believe that we are. If we change the main character, if we respect ourselves, then just like magic, all the secondary characters will change. We can only give what we have, and if we don't respect ourselves, how can we respect others?
The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.
I haven't been in the film world long enough to really understand the gravity of 'Big Hero's' success. I'm just happy that it is translating well internationally and that the story and the characters are loved by audiences around the world, and everything that's come after that has been secondary to the initial response.
You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and embarked on fascinating doings, their story told in sprightly visual fashion.
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
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