I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.
You hope to see an arc of growth in your ability to become a character on television.
Sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore. Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing.
As a writer, you know what the purpose of the scene is. It really has nothing to do with the actor so you have to really get out of that space because for actors it's a micro-focus and then you figure out your arc through what the writers have given you to say. But that arc is just one little piece of the huge arc of the whole film. It took a while to get out of that.
When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country.
For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.
There arc no such things as desperate situations. Only desperate men.
My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.
I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.
Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.
I think there was a lot of working out the arc of how Manny [Daniel Radcliffe] talks. Scene to scene [in the Swiss army Man], if I would start talking a little too well, they would come in and say like, "Hey, you need to [dial back] your ability to speak" - things like that.
I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it's not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.
The most important, overriding arc of my career has been that I would never be self-deprecating.
I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it. . . that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.
It's a whole other way of working when you work in films: You know exactly the arc of your character.
Its really interesting working in television as opposed to the theater, where you know the arc of the character and you are able to create this whole backstory.
I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response.
I love drama. I love to play an arc.
At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.
Having been a theater person first, you have the whole character, and you see the arc of the character in a play. And then when you do a movie, you have the whole character - or, if it's a small role, there's not much arc, but you see what the whole part is.
