Really complicated, interesting women at the centre of very, very well written dramas – and that’s what floats my boat.
A lot of Christmas episodes of comedies are comedies trying to be dramas.
I’d always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they’re born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.
I love romantic comedies, or romantic dramas – basically anything with love in it.
Prior to doing a ‘Bond’ film, I was a young actor doing classical theater and some BBC dramas. Then, suddenly, I was thrown into this franchise. I had never experienced anything like it.
For years we’ve had all the big-hitting HBO box-set dramas, all these brilliant, witty, clever shows, and in return the only thing we’ve had to offer is big period dramas like ‘Downton Abbey’.
This is why sports will always be the greatest of dramas; the most exciting entertainment known to man. Nobody can predict the outcome and the script is ever in flux.
I really like dramas that have a tone of comedy in them or the opposite, and those are done by people like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman but also Spike Jonze and David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers.
I have been through and seen so many dramas and traumas and been in so many situations that I can probably interpret a few different characters.
I could have been bigger, but I wasn’t controversial enough. I didn’t do drugs or wreck rooms. There were no dramas in my private life.
Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that’s how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There’s years of history in every interaction.
I like dramas. I’ve always liked dramas. And I’m a pretty light person. I don’t consider myself a very dramatic person. But I do like doing that onscreen.
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
You can’t write a screenplay if you’ve been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society.
I think the audience expect me to be on saas-bahu dramas – such shows attract me also.
The idea of science fiction, mythology, and creating a world is my favourite thing. I do love the reality of dramas and playing that, but being able to start from scratch, to completely build the character and this world, I love that.
We live in the golden age of character actors – in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.
The development process is not that simple… When I started working at Fox in ’92, the company had decided that dramas were dead: they weren’t viable businesses and because newsmagazines were so efficient to produce and financially so much more tolerable than a drama. So that year, our company developed very few dramas.
I love doing dramas because it’s quiet and focused work.
There are a lot of films that are drug dramas, and we didn’t want to tell Scarface again.
I’ve been doing a lot of children’s dramas, but I really wanted to move into more gritty stuff.
I did nothing but dramas for seven years in New York. I didn’t really start anything comedic until I moved out to L.A. and found The Groundlings.
I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don’t know… ‘Lawrence Of Arabia’ or ‘Apocalypse Now’; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.
My heroes are Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman. Those are the two actors that both do comedies and dramas, seamlessly. Also John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman. They’re all just great actors, neither comedic nor dramatic. They’re just great actors.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don’t know what I want. I don’t want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
I wanted to make a film that wouldn’t just appeal to Formula One fans. That’s what the great sports documentaries do – ‘Hoop Dreams,’ ‘When We Were Kings’ – they’re human dramas first, sport second, if at all.
It gives me vertigo to watch TV dramas.
I don’t watch TV dramas. I watch ESPN, HBO boxing, National Geographic Channel and I kind of like to get some DVDs, movies that I haven’t seen and I just pop them in.
I like dramas because there’s a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.
I get a lot of flack from critics that my comedies are all over the place, my dramas are all over the place, they’re schizophrenic – as if I don’t know that!
I sort of was inspired by ‘Friday Night Lights,’ where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that’s really why I wanted to develop ‘Parenthood’ as a series.
Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let’s say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either – in the case of horror – more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.
I was trained classically, and that’s something that I want to do, but I do want to say that right now it’s a good market for female comedians, and I want to explore that right now. I really do want to do dramas and meatier roles, especially film.
Well, honestly, I’m not a massive fan of courtroom dramas.
I take 18 to 19 tablets a day, plus an injection every other day. I get side-effects from some of the medication that aren’t ideal. Plus, I hate having to inject myself. It’s painful and it creates a few dramas.
There are always going to be hospital dramas because if you’re sitting in an emergency room for two hours, I guarantee you you are going to see something that makes you gasp. That’s where drama comes from.
I have always liked family-type dramas; I just think the dynamics in families make for some really interesting characters.
As far as dramas are concerned, it’s considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.
Honestly, I’m not a massive fan of courtroom dramas.
Comedies always need to be provocative and catch your attention in a way that dramas don’t have to.
Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner’s music dramas comes from the singers’ capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.
Without a doubt, the majority of historical period dramas tend to be told from a certain perspective. At least in America, black people have some visibility in period dramas, although it’s usually in the form of slaves or servitude.
I like ‘The Usual Suspects’. Great film. I also like ‘Scarface’, films like that. Lots of gangster films. I really like watching all kinds of films, dramas, romance. I’ll watch comedies. I like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle. I’d like to meet them.
The writing in those HBO dramas, like ‘The Wire,’ is as good as anything I’ve seen.
I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.
I love watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Rome,’ and ‘Spartacus’ from the period dramas genre.
I worked on dramas before, I love sinking my teeth into something dramatic or a period piece, but there’s something so fun about doing a comedy. When you go to set and your only job is to make people laugh, there’s an unbelievable energy on set.
A lot of period dramas can appear quite arch to most people, stuffy.
When we are in our dorms, we watch romance movies and dramas. When a romantic scene comes on, we hold on to each other and scream.
You know, dramas are much more expensive to do than say a comedy, so any kind of deficit like that is picked up on when it comes time for them to pick up new shows.
I would like to do more dramas when I find a good role that will allow me to politely upset people’s expectations of me as a comic actor.
I love political dramas. I love good story-telling.
Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an ‘appropriate’ life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what’s to keep it from happening to me or you?
You can only do so many serious dramas in a row before you want to break. You want a change.
I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don’t want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene; I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.
