We’ve collected the best Dramas Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Asif Kapadia, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Estelle, Richard LaGravenese, Vikrant Massey. Use them as an inspiration.
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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.
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I always have to get my U.K. fix, and ‘Downton Abbey‘ is definitely that. I absolutely love period dramas, but this one is particularly appealing – following the ins and outs of aristocracy as well as the interaction between the rich and the poor.
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My family life reads a bit like ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ I was big sister to Joan, Renee, and brother William, and we grew up in Dalkey, a little town 10 miles outside of Dublin. It was a secure, safe and happy childhood, which was meant to be a disadvantage when it comes to writing stories about family dramas.
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I don’t have a horror film in me just because I don’t like to be scared. But I definitely have a documentary in me, and I certainly have dramas.
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I’ll read, like, ten scripts, and then sometimes if I’m lucky, there will be two or three scripts that I like, and sometimes they’ll all be dramas, or they’ll all be comedies, or there will be two dramas and a comedy, and then I’ll go for whatever. If I have to audition, I’ll audition. If it’s an offer, great.
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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?
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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.
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I want to do dramas. I want to do comedies.
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I have always liked family-type dramas; I just think the dynamics in families make for some really interesting characters.
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I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.
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I’d like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot – these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other – coming to a theatre near you!
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I think that what ‘Oz’ did is it spawned a great generation of television production. But people know its place in television and just in great dramas. It’s the foundation of my career. Most producers, show runners, directors, and casting directors put me in movies based on my performance in that show.
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It’s not like I want to be Prince Charming when I do dramas. But I think I’ve always shown such an image because that’s just the way Korean dramas work.
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Because I’ve done so many hour dramas, people tend to think of you as more of a dramatic actor and don’t see you as doing comedy.
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When I signed ‘Guide,’ my colleagues in the industry said that I was doing a big mistake. They even said that this might be my last film because that was the phase when actresses in the industry were portrayed as submissive women. We used to do love stories or family dramas where women were ideal in every role.
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All my cop/gangster dramas have been spaced out, but somewhere, the films in which I played the bad guy were extremely successful, so people are under the impression that I play only such roles. I call it selective amnesia.
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I am keen to work in romantic stories and dramas.
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I love period dramas and language, but I love comedy as well.
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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’.
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I’ve been doing dramas for a long time.
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I love period dramas – be it romance or philosophy.
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I went to America to get away from constantly being cast in costume dramas, playing posh people.
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I’m drawn to dramas that make people think. I want to make an impact.
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You don’t read many scripts, especially for crime dramas, that feature a strong woman as the central character.
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I actually started in comedy, but then after ‘Deadwood’ I started concentrating on the dramas more. But then I just got tired for raping and killing and figured, ‘It’s time to do another comedy.’
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You just never see people of different ethnicities in period dramas.
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As far as dramas are concerned, it’s considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.
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I would say 80% of the scripts I get are dramas and not comedies or romantic comedies, which is funny because that’s what I do every week.
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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.
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I grew up on courtroom dramas, and I really love the feel of a dramatic thriller.
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Everything was magnificent so far, even if I knew my part of dramas.
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The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there’s no ‘dark comedy’ inbox for the advertising.
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Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.
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I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.
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I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.
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I think that the difference between ‘The Sopranos‘ and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren’t about the writer himself.
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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.
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The writing in those HBO dramas, like ‘The Wire,’ is as good as anything I’ve seen.
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I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.
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If there’s room for 30 reality shows, surely there’s room for two amazing costume dramas.
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I don’t enjoy other people’s dramas, and I don’t enjoy mine.
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I watch a lot of TV dramas.
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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.
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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.
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I did everything – I did newscasts, I did sports, I did dramas.
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I think TV is a fantastic medium right now because of what you can do visually. It’s phenomenal, and it’s just getting better and better, but in a way, there’s no beating the personal image you can create in your head, with those personal aspects, which you can only get from reading or radio dramas.
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I did ‘Little Dorrit’ a few years ago; I really love doing period dramas. It’s stuff like that I really enjoy watching.
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Anyone can write. But comedy, you’ve got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
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I love political dramas. I love good story-telling.
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You know, I’ve always wanted to do dramas.
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People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don’t know. It’s like Baltimore or something. I don’t know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.
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Honestly, I’m not a massive fan of courtroom dramas.
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I played comedies and dramas.
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I’m not a big believer in the idea of genre – I’m a fan of any writer who can pull me into compelling characters and stories – but I can’t imagine I’ll start writing domestic dramas any time soon.
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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.
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We received our initial inspiration from our family, as from childhood we exhibited an inclination towards art. While Johns randomly drew pictures, I used to present dramas for my siblings. But when we grew up, we both got addicted to our interests and it was fueled by political activism.
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I was lucky enough to be able to do comedies, dramas, completely different parts. At the beginning, when you start you have a fantasy that you could be somebody else. Which is absurd. That’s part of being an actor. It’s your voice, it’s the way you move, it’s your body, even if you transform it, you play with it.
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With family dramas, it’s hard to keep those stories alive.
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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.
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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.
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I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.
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Sometimes I look at music as like movies. And so I feel like you can have your comedies, and you can have your dramas, and you can have your romances or whatever.
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Period dramas seem to take actors to the next level because they do so well in America.
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I grew up doing a lot of theatre, plays, dramas, musicals.
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My 20s were peaceful, privileged, but still I felt the desire to write angsty dramas.
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We’ve seen Shakespeare done a billion times to make it seem relevant today. We love period dramas. We love to long for a time gone by.
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A mother‘s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
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The court dramas shown in films and TV are often superficial. They should have a gripping storyline, which can keep the audience hooked.
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I just love doing broader work – I always get asked to do fairly heavy-duty, intense dramas and interesting, psychologically intense characters. But you know, it’s nice to make people laugh sometimes.
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Period dramas have their own challenges. One must work hard to ensure that you don’t just embrace the character you are playing, you also have to understand the smaller nuances of the period to deliver an authentic experience.
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I actually feel like, for a lot of my career, I wasn’t able to show my comedic range. I did a lot of dramas and dramedies. I was on ‘E.R.’ That’s not generally thought of as a funny show.
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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.
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People look at me, they know I’ve appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person.
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I just want to be with great teachers. If that means I’m in a horror film with good teachers, I’ll do another horror film. But I would love to branch out and do more comedy or just more straight dramas.
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Ideally, that’s what you’ve got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films.
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I went to drama school. I’m classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare’s comedies over his dramas.
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Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time.
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There are a lot of period dramas out there but not many opportunities for a mixed-race actress to play a period role.
