Quotes from Robert McKee

Story Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. This crowning Major Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather, it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the film producers of the world, it would be these three words: "Meaning Produces Emotion." Not money; not sex; not special effects; not movie stars; not lush photography.

No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers. We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent. No matter where a film is made—Hollywood, Paris, Hong Kong—if it's of archetypal quality, it triggers a global and perpetual chain reaction of pleasure that carries it from cinema to cinema, generation to generation.

First, the discovery of a world we do not know.

Second, once inside this alien world, we find ourselves. Deep within these characters and their conflicts we discover our own humanity.

Al reducirse nuestra fe en las ideologías tradicionales, nos dirigimos hacia la fuente en la que todavía creemos: el arte de contar historias.

The most important question we ask when writing a Love Story is: "What's to stop them?" For where's the story in a Love Story? Two people meet, fall in love, marry, raise a family, support each other till death do them part … what could be more boring than that?

Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.

No hay en este mundo suficiente de nada para todos. No hay suficientes alimentos, suficiente amor, suficiente justicia y nunca hay suficiente tiempo.

A revered Hollywood axiom warns: "Movies are about their last twenty minutes." In other words, for a film to have a chance in the world, the last act and its climax must be the most satisfying experience of all. For no matter what the first ninety minutes have achieved, if the final movement fails, the film will die over its opening weekend.

In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.

The minimalist storyteller deliberately gives this last critical bit of work to the audience.

As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship

As we gather in all the scenes that satirize Hollywood aristocracy, we realize that commercial films that presume to instruct society on how to solve its shortcomings are certain to be false. For, with few exceptions, most filmmakers, like Sullivan, are not interested in the suffering poor as much as the picturesque poor.

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.

For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.

First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world.

We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.

Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.

Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition.

We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.

Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.

storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life.

Values are the soul of storytelling.