Quotes About Narrative

I think if you make good, interesting content with compelling story lines and good characters, people will tune into the web for as long as you want them to.

For any film or any web show, the story dictates everything. If it is a good story, it obviously has good characters in it.

I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.

If you think of human experience as a pie, then the wedge Hollywood is reflecting now is getting smaller and smaller.

Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

To me, there's still nothing more thrilling than, every week, people getting to see another chapter in this story that you're telling.

People have to respond to the characters and respond to the situations that they're in. That said, it still has to be a compelling narrative that drives along and keeps people coming back week after week. So really, with any successful show you could name, there has to be a mysterious blend of both of those.

I was making commercial films like 'Chocolate' and 'Hate Story.' Then came a time when I realised that such stories only entertain for a week, and then we forget about them.

In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative.

I think 'Westworld' and 'Hap and Leonard' are two of the greatest things that you can do with this oversized pool of the television medium.

Through eight years, 'How I Met Your Mother' has mastered the art of leading-edge comedy, emotional water-cooler moments, and pop culture catch-phrases.

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

We need to feminise history because we are 50 per cent of the population, and our story is just as interesting.

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

Movies and TV are America's No. 1 export. So if our No. 1 export is all male, all white, then there's only one point of view. And I just think it's really important that as Americans - I'm a new American, but I am an American - that we don't portray ourselves to the world so one-sided and exclusive.

I would love to continue to tell stories that are constructive to our society; I would love to continue to portray characters that are people who have been oppressed in our world.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.

The stories are being written by men, and it's men who are directing it. As long as that continues, you won't be seeing much change in the way women are portrayed in cinema.

How I'm portrayed in films has more to do with the filmmaking and what they need in the story than anything else. I'm the same person I've always been, I just get used in different ways according to the filmmakers' needs - which is fine with me; it makes for great films.

I think portraying the Joker's point of view would do a disservice to that character. As soon as you get inside his head he would lose so much power.

Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.