Quotes About Storytelling

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

I've always wanted to make an improv movie because I have so much experience in it.

The idea of just improvising and riffing can sometimes be at the expense of story.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.

Most of my stories have some basis in fact.

I read a lot of script. In my opinion, most of them aren't good or aren't about people.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

Many filmmakers start off with an autobiographical film from childhood, and that's kind of what I was thinking I would do, but other projects would just present themselves naturally in the beginning.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

It takes such little imagination to include people of colour in the stories you tell and so much more work to exclude folks.

If you're going to tell stories about life, you have to include a woman in your story.

'The Hobbit' didn't include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really.

I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.

George Martin is an incredible writer.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story.

I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.

I'd like to do an independent film.

I would like to do more independent films.

An eight-hour movie is definitely not a two-hour movie. An eight-hour movie is really like five independent films, if you think about it, because each is usually an hour and a half. In some ways, it is like making a movie. It's just a lot more information.

At the end of the day, you don't remember 'Mother India' or 'Pyaasa' for the business it did, you remember them because they had a good story to tell.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.