"It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert"
About this Quote
Jordan is describing the eerie moment when authorship stops feeling like control and starts feeling like collaboration with your own imagination. Coming from a director, the line lands as both craft talk and quiet confession: you can plan a character down to the eyebrow twitch, but if they don’t generate their own momentum, the whole project moves like a puppet with tangled strings.
The blunt binary - they live or they don’t - rejects the romantic myth that brilliance is just persistence. Jordan’s subtext is harsher: you can do everything “right” (backstory, motivation, arc) and still end up with something inert. That word matters. “Inert” isn’t “unfinished” or “needs revision.” It’s lifeless, an object. He’s naming the difference between a character who surprises you and one who simply executes your outline.
As a filmmaker, Jordan’s context is practical. Cinema is a collective art where performance, casting, camera, editing, and even weather can animate or flatten a role. Some scripts are technically sound but resist embodiment; some characters only become real once an actor’s contradictions enter the frame. Jordan’s admission that he has “written many things” that failed on this front is also a flex in humility: the gap between intention and vitality is normal, even for veterans.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to moralize. No inspiring lesson, no tidy hack. Just the unnerving truth that sometimes the story doesn’t choose you back.
The blunt binary - they live or they don’t - rejects the romantic myth that brilliance is just persistence. Jordan’s subtext is harsher: you can do everything “right” (backstory, motivation, arc) and still end up with something inert. That word matters. “Inert” isn’t “unfinished” or “needs revision.” It’s lifeless, an object. He’s naming the difference between a character who surprises you and one who simply executes your outline.
As a filmmaker, Jordan’s context is practical. Cinema is a collective art where performance, casting, camera, editing, and even weather can animate or flatten a role. Some scripts are technically sound but resist embodiment; some characters only become real once an actor’s contradictions enter the frame. Jordan’s admission that he has “written many things” that failed on this front is also a flex in humility: the gap between intention and vitality is normal, even for veterans.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to moralize. No inspiring lesson, no tidy hack. Just the unnerving truth that sometimes the story doesn’t choose you back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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