Quotes About Narrative

If you're going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.

You think about taking audiences on a journey.

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.

I'm very interested in cinema that explores emotional journeys and where you can use everything at your disposal cinematically to locate you inside someone's head and their emotional landscape.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.

To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.

It's one of the things I love about my job: it's my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help.

I'm not someone who seeks out stories of people who are suffering. I think they just kind of find me.

When we have gay characters on TV, they're just, kind of, gay for the sake of being gay. That's their personality. That's their whole backstory, that's their future story, that's their present story - it's just gay. Nobody's just gay.

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.

Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary.

It is okay to put as much money as you want in a story, as long as it is justified.

For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.

The hardest lesson to learn always is to just have faith in that you will always have something to say or a story to tell. I have faith that I'll be able to continue to tell stories, write and tell stories. You just need to keep going at it.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

I always devise a background so that it makes what your character goes through logical and keeps up the continuity.

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

Those of us with this ancient compulsion to tell stories sometimes start with a single kernel of something.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

For me, certain shots or scenes are keys in the movie.

Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.

You've all seen movies where the music isn't working with the story. And it's either because... the story isn't working itself. Or the composer kinda just wants to write whatever they want to write, not paying attention to the thing.

I think at a certain point actors need to start taking responsibility for the kinds of stories they want to tell.