Quotes from Robert McKee

Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. "He's been sitting there for a long time" can't be photographed.

intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that's defined by the nature of the fictional reality. This line may reach inward to the soul, outward into the universe, or in both directions at once. The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges.

The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line. The audience senses that limit and wants it reached. For no matter how

The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied—the end of the line.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality

When we peek behind the grinning mask of comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: "Let's invite some comedy writers to the party! That'll brighten things up." Sure...till the paramedics arrive.

Henry James wrote brilliantly about story art in the prefaces to his novels, and once asked: "What, after all, is an event?" An event, he said, could be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table and looking at you "that certain way.

Life teaches that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value, the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks—our freedom, our lives, our souls.

Turning Points fail when we overprepare the obvious and underprepare the unusual.

There is no such thing as a portable story. An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

Story is about thoroughness, not shortcuts.

Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT.

Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons.

INVESTIGACIÓN La clave para ganar esta guerra es la investigación, dedicar tiempo y esfuerzo a adquirir conocimiento. Yo sugiero algunos métodos específicos: la investigación en nuestra memoria, la investigación de la imaginación y la investigación de los hechos. Habitualmente, toda historia necesita utilizar las tres.

Art consists of separating one tiny piece from the rest of the universe and holding it up in such a way that it appears to be the most important, fascinating thing of this moment.

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, "...the centre can not hold.

Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the "secrets" of story have been as public as the library down the street. Nothing in the craft of storytelling is abstruse. In fact, at first glance telling story for the screen looks deceptively easy. But moving closer and closer to the center, trying scene by scene to make the story work, the task becomes increasingly difficult, as we realize that on the screen there's no place to hide.

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart.

What is the "substance" of story?

comic cynicism

Cliche is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media.

Un ACONTECIMIENTO NARRATIVO crea un cambio en la situación de vida de un personaje, tiene significado y se expresa y experimenta en términos de VALOR.

To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist's responsibility. Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

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