Quotes About Storytelling

Horror used to be one thing, and I think that's starting to broaden - there can have subgenres, and other things can be going on in a horror story. In comics, you'll never get the 'Boo' effect in a comic; you can go for mood, atmosphere and personal tragedy to build the horror elements and sense of dread.

We live lives that aren't broken into neat three-act structures. On any given day anything can happen, from the hilarious to tragic. So why can't my movies be like that?

I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.

I'm a sucker for gag reels and teaser trailers for new seasons. One of the great parts of panels, especially on a show like 'Supernatural,' which can be so dark, it's fun to get up there and laugh and remember we're only telling a story. Seeing Eric Kripke and Ben Edlund up there being so funny always makes me laugh.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.

I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.

I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn't make me a genius, and there really isn't anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

When you start directing movies at the age of 24, you're just a kid; you don't necessarily even have the experiences to add to the story. You're working off of instinct and raw emotions and raw talent, and hopefully it's the same trajectory as growing as a person.

When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly.

Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.

The seminal elements of what makes a story great - challenge, struggle, resolution - are the same whether we're talking about story content for a movie such as 'Rain Man,' or telling a purposeful story to forge new business relationships or conclude a fruitful transaction, such as acquiring an NBA franchise.

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.

Telling your story is transformative. For both the storyteller and their audience, a new bridge to understanding is created.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.

To you people out there, you producers and you network owners and you agents and you creative sparks, please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their story. Do that.

I had the idea that I'm going to make a trans-genre film about a transgender woman.