A Quote by George Tillman, Jr.
I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.
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Your actors need to trust you as a director, but normally, I think you just need to have an open communication between the actors and the director. I think the director needs to really paint his or her vision to the cast and let them know the kind of mood that he or she is making. I think that's very important.
Sometimes, when actors reach out to their characters, they're nowhere in sight. They need to find something inside of them. And then the characters are right there. As a director, I want them to find the character that's already inside them, instead of trying to manufacture or manipulate or make something up. That's not really honest or true.
I think one of the major things a director has to do is to know his subject matter, the subject matter of his script, know the truth and the reality of it. That's very important.
I think bringing depth to characters means really needing to find out who this girl is, what is she passionate about, what makes her tick, what gets her going in life. So I did a lot of backstory for who she was and sometimes it comes across screen and sometimes it doesn't. You never know, because you're not the director, but you can only do your work and hope that it somehow subtly is infiltrated in that. But I think the characters I've played for the most part have depth, just not in the way that you think they do.
I support security at the borders. I think security is enormously important in the post-September 11th period. I think we have to know who's coming into this country. We have to be able to identify them; we have to be able to figure out who they are.
I think the most important thing for an actor is reading the script and trying to figure out if you can play that character well. The last thing on my mind is if the director made good movies previously. It's not my job to know if that director's last movie was any good - it's my job to know if I can play the role.
Gettting to know your characters is so much more important than plotting. Working out every detail of your story in advance, especially when you don't yet know your main characters, always seems a little too much like playing God. You're working out your characters' lives, their destiny, before they've had a chance to discover who they are and what kind of people they want to be.
I think that what's important as a director is to give your actors the feeling that they're protected, the feeling of confidence, the feeling that if they make mistakes, then as a director, you'll know how to help them. If you're able to convey that, then the actors will give you wonderful performances. As well as the author, you have to write scenes that give the actors the opportunity to show what they're capable of.
I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.
A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.
Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.
In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.
The real work of an actor goes on inside, and I don't think it changes from director to director - I always go for broke! But I don't get a lot of direction, unfortunately.
I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.
I think the director is becoming more important. To work under rushed conditions, you need to have an extremely professional director. If the director's good than the end result will be good.
A director is the captain of the ship; he gets the vision of the film much before anyone else can. While I want to experiment with characters, I know a good director means I am in safe hands.
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