"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message 
news:4b5a1ffb@news.povray.org...
>
>  Do I understand correctly that when a character in a story exists 
> basically
> for one single purpose (eg. to be a jerk, a greedy executive, a naive
> Mary Sue, or such) with no other personality traits or history, and when
> this character maintains the role in its purest form throughout the entire
> story, it's usually a bad case of two-dimensionality?
>

Not necessarily bad... as a character goes through his story and he meets 
people, he may only see them for a moment. His first impression may be his 
only impression. If we are seeing the story through his eyes, the character 
will seem to lack depth, because the protagonist never sees it. Learning a 
lot about characters which do not advance the plot would slow the pacing of 
the story, and pacing is very important.

IMO, Avatar has excellent pacing. The energy of the story ebbs and flows 
very nicely, and I felt very engaged by the whole thing. The story of Avatar 
wouldn't work very well as a novel, unless they added an awful lot to it 
(more about life on Earth, more about the side characters, and so on), but I 
think it worked really well as a film. In a good film, the story is always 
competing with the visual, and, to a lesser extent, with the music and 
sound. A simple story is sometimes best in that kind of mix.

One of the things I do before an acting performance is to write a backstory 
for my character. I list facts that happened in the character's life, even 
if they have nothing to do with the story and they'll never come out in the 
performance. What it does is to remind me that they character isn't just 
words on a page, but a representation of a real person. It helps me to 
understand why the character does what he does, and, I think, adds to the 
performance, even for a minor character. I'd be willing to bet a large chunk 
of change that Stephen Lang, as one of the artistic directors for the 
Actor's Studio, did that before he did this movie.

--
Jack

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