My dad taught me to never be pigeonholed; to really allow yourself to reinvent characters as they reinvent you; to be bold and to be willing to play seemingly unlikeable people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
'Pigeonholed' isn't the right word, because I feel like I've had a very wide range of characters that I've been allowed to play.
When I was younger, my father told me not to pigeonhole the way that I perceive myself.
Early on, when I wrote 'Little Man Tate,' I got pigeonholed. Somebody said to me, 'You're not very dark,' and I had trouble getting certain kinds of jobs... and I learned very early that I didn't want to get pigeonholed as anything. And my next script was 'Dead Again.'
Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.
Sometimes you become friends with the characters you portray.
My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.
I've learned through experience of playing different characters, some of whom were jerks, that when you play a character who is pretentious or obnoxious, in any way, it's important to knock them down a peg.
It's obvious that if you're going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they're in and use as little or as much as necessary.
I think I've spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.
You can't afford for there to be gaps in your pool of knowledge when it comes to a character; otherwise, what ends up onscreen is generalized and unspecific.
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