A Quote by Stephen Graham

There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen. — © Stephen Graham
There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.
I think there are things that are based in your own dealings with someone that is a personal dealing, not a public dealing. Because you have personal experiences.
Your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you'll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you'll try to forget things you've seen that no one should see, but you just can't do it. And when you try to forget someone's face, you can't get it out of your head.
If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.
There's a certain amount of pressure that goes with writing superhero characters, especially characters that are beloved to audiences. You know that you're always writing into a certain amount of expectations and into an existing fandom, and I try to take the pressure of that in when I first accept a project and then I try to push it aside as much as possible and just focus on the story that I want to tell. It's definitely a little more pressure than writing something of your own, from your own brain, and creating those expectations from scratch. But I also like the challenge of it.
Do your own thing; always follow your dreams and don't feel limited by what someone prescribes to you as to what you should do. Expand your horizons, try new things, be adventurous.
I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.
So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.
I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.
You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
I think the biggest mistake anyone can make is trying to be the next someone, and try to mimic or copy someone who is already out there because you have to produce your own personality and your own sound, and go from there. That is something all great broadcasters have been able to do.
It's hard to be surprised by a film. It's hard to be surprised by another actor or by a director when you've seen enough and been around. So when I am, or when I forget that I'm watching someone's movie, or when I don't know how someone made a certain turn that I didn't expect... You know, I'm in.
It's hard to be surprised by a film. It's hard to be surprised by another actor or by a director when you've seen enough and been around. So when I am, or when I forget that I'm watching someone's movie, or when I don't know how someone made a certain turn that I didn't expect . . . You know, I'm in.
I think it's always a really stupid thing to base your achievement on someone else. I just want to base it on myself... do something that I can be proud of, and then I'll be happy.
You work hard, you sacrifice for everything you do, and in one second, someone can tarnish your name - someone can bad-mouth you, and someone can say things. People let all of the good things gets washed away because someone spoke ill of them.
I can feel things - tap into emotions. When I meet a new person, I know their life straight away. I suppose you could call it a special intuition, but it's my number one quality, and I'm always 99.9 percent right. If I don't like someone, it always turns out to be for a good reason.
I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.
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