There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation.
This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history’s arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South.
You always start a fight scene or an action scene with, ‘What are we learning about this character at the moment, and how are we gonna arc him or her in the next three minutes,’ and it’s no different with ‘Deadpool’ or ‘Atomic Blonde’ or ‘John Wick.’
We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches.
The boomers’ biggest impact will be on eliminating the term ‘retirement’ and inventing a new stage of life… the new career arc.
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.
For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.
I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.
Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I’m convinced she’ll get away with it. It’s the only way to get through life.
I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don’t speak in dialogue. Their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
When I read a script or I see a character, I don’t necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she’s different from she was in the beginning. I guess it’s more a subconscious understanding of that arc.
The arc of Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing has gotten bigger than when he hit line drives. Juan Gonzalez is a terrific power hitter, too.
A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it’s pretty much the same every week.
To me, great writing – and when you can really make something wonderful out of it as an actor – is when your character has a sense of self-awareness. It doesn’t necessarily have to arc. It doesn’t have to grow.
‘Portlandia’ is the most fun show. When I get a breakdown of what the arc of the story is going to be, I could never in my wildest dreams anticipate the direction.
Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.
As an actor, I had the most power than I’ve ever had before, because I was able to create and arc and pursue that idea fully, because as every new director that came on, no one knew ‘Hanna’ like I knew ‘Hanna.’ That is something that I knew inside me.
Like a lot of people, I sold my first script in graduate school at UCLA, a ‘Joan of Arc’ for producer Joel Silver.
I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character’s arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you’re sort of powerless to what happens.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
When I hear the piano played in a compositional way, like in a songwriter’s way in a compositional way, there’s a certain arc to that that I love.
‘The Real World’ is the most predictable arc ever. They get on the show, they’re all excited, we’re gonna be best friends, then people start drinking and get hammered, and say stupid stuff, and that’s pretty much it.
My favorite part about Mare Barrow is her almost selfish survival instinct, as well as her increasingly gray morality. Her character arc in ‘Glass Sword’ is a lot deeper and more emotional than before, so I’m glad I got to write this sequel and that people want to read it.
I just look at the character and the arc of the character, and see if it’s going to be challenging. We always want to challenge ourselves. That’s the biggest thing that I look at. Is this going to be a challenge? Is this going to be something that I can try my best to create, that no one could see anyone else do?
It’s one huge arc right until you’re in your early 20s. You’re always changing and always learning, but it’s very much that chapter in your life: fall crazy in love, become extremely angry at little things. It’s a tumultuous time.
If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don’t mean to.
I’d like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that’s why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work.
The writing for us is the hardest, but also the most important. You want to get to the next part of it, to production, but it doesn’t matter how beautifully made it is if something’s wrong with the story arc.
With all of our big-hit shows – like ‘Big Bang Theory,’ and even ‘How I Met Your Mother’ – when they first started, you have multiple characters to service, and you want to make sure that the audience has a chance to get the concept, get the emotional arc, and really engage with the relationships.
‘Breaking Bad’ – when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston’s character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.
When I started thinking about ‘Mr. Robot,’ I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I’m going to tell.
I would not want to do one-episode television – that’s just a brief encounter with your audience. The arc takes the actor into an arena where he can really stretch.
You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it’s tough to do that – you only have 90 minutes.
What’s great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.
I’ve had such an incredible arc, so it made sense to me, creatively, that we’ve told Laurel’s story. It has come to an end in the ‘Arrow’-verse.
I don’t want to play the girlfriend who’s there because she’s the girlfriend. And. That’s. Her. Job. I want to play women and girls who are active and strong and who have a character arc and make decisions and have a rich background.
I’m making my Broadway musical debut at the age of 73 – it’s a kind of interesting career arc.
I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history – in fact, she had been thrashed out.
There’s not a lot of arc in an actual psychopath.
Some actors – myself included – like to know where your character’s going: you like to know what the arc is for the character so that you can plan where you’re going to give beats for this, that, and the other and give the audience what they want. But on ‘Homeland,’ you do the opposite.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
Joan of Arc’ is about not feeling scared to call yourself beautiful. Why shouldn’t you!?
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
I think it helped that ‘Fleabag’ had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.
No matter how much I plan the overall arc of the character, you get there day one on the film and you shooting certain scenes first, and it goes completely different to anything you ever thought of, and then it’s done.
Acting is very physical, even when it doesn’t appear to be. It’s about the arc of your body’s language through a film.
The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.
The great thing about being an actor in a film is that you’re able to start knowing exactly where you’re going to finish and really paint something in between. You can work to know the arc you need to build. Whereas in television, it is open-ended, and you’re constantly guessing. There are pros and cons to both.
Trajectories aren’t linear. Life’s just a roller coaster. If you’re getting a chance to do cool stuff, and it’s varied stuff, just enjoy it. I guess I’m a believer in the randomness of life rather than it being a linear trajectory or an arc, a consistent smooth arc, towards anything.
