Quotes About Storytelling

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

I love working with male actors, and I think there's a tendency to write really interesting characters that would work solely alongside men where they would be in a man's world and have to deal with that, and it creates a lot of interesting storylines. For me, it's kind of circumstantial, but I definitely enjoy it.

The films that have influenced me most are: 'The Hustler', 'Badlands', 'Hud', 'Tender Mercies', 'Cool Hand Luke', 'A Perfect World', and 'Laurence of Arabia'. I also really like 'Fletch'. I feel like all of these films reached an honest place in regard to the human condition while also stringing together really entertaining stories.

As an actor I've been attracted to the sort of films that I want to go and see. That tends to usually be drama-related.

There are many great writers out there and, actually, great scripts. The problem is - and this is what I've always felt, even when I got out of school and started reading scripts - the really smart, character-driven stuff tends to be smaller films, and they just don't get made.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

What I realized is that it doesn't matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it's still the same thing. It's still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I'm happy to have a physical part in 'High Tension,' in 'Hereafter,' and in a lot of French movies and Belgian movies. But its not by chance directors choose me for physical parts. I like to do that. I like to tell a story also with the body. It's important, because you can tell a lot of things.

It's often the death of the show when you break the tension and the two lead characters get together.

Alfred Hitchcock had to find ways to create tension without showing it, but now with computer-generated effects you can show anything.

I'm very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera - it's just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.

If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.

Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it's nice to go, 'Well, I'm gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.' You don't get to do that on television.

The quality of TV drama nowadays is getting better and better. They've had to invent a new term for it: 'high-end television.'

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

The thing about action films is that they are high on drama in terms of action sequences, have songs and other things, but content is secondary.

I think content-driven cinema is appealing in terms of even money-making.

In terms of script, Bollywood should learn from South Indian scripts. Not talking about the fights and action, I am talking about the drama bit.

It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.