A Quote by James Gray
What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.
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Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.
I've always been very strong minded on character-based fights and character-based action. If you take the character out of the action and you just shoot it as an action sequence, the audience starts to lose connection.
Names generate meaning in a short amount of space — they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.
Where does a character come from? Because a character, at the end of the day, a character will be the combination of the writing of the character, the voicing of the character, the personality of the character, and what the character looks like.
You have a certain objectivity, as a member of the audience, and you can come away maybe being provoked into a certain discourse or a certain arena of questioning, regarding how you would deal with things that your character has to deal with. Whereas when you're doing a film, once you start asking, "What would I do?," you're getting the distance greater between yourself and the character, or you're bringing the character to you, which I think is self-serving, in the wrong way. The idea is to bring yourself to the character.
An actor doesn't change thought, theme, or mood unless the character does, and the character only does it within the words of the play.
Action is only really compelling when it reveals character - character revealed through action, and not action for its own sake.
A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.
I realized there's a difference between creating a character and sustaining a character. The challenge that comes with sustaining a character is that you have this sudden impulse to think about all the things the audience liked.
Any character that you come up with or create is a piece of you. You're putting yourself into that character, but there's the guise of the character. So there's a certain amount of safety in the character, where you feel more safe being the character than you do being just you
The distance between your knowledge of truth and your obedience is called lack of integrity. And the amount of negative behavior-or lack of integrity-a person exhibits is directly proportional to their amount of pain.
I think when you're a new actor in Bollywood, it's about seizing the moment. If you can prove to the audience there is an emotional vulnerability to your character, regardless of it being black or gray, I think the audience will accept you in any role - be it romantic or action.
What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character's facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.
My whole mood or sense can change by virtue of the music that I'm listening to. It really does affect me on a visceral and emotional level.
I remember feeling the temperature change the first time the curtain came up, the difference between the audience temperature and the stage temperature. I'll never forget it.
I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.
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