Quotes About Storytelling

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

I was the youngest, and there was my mother, my father and my brother. They each had their own way of turning anything, from washing up an eggcup to a chase across the North York Moors to catch up with a train, into a comic account.

Shyam Benegal has found a lovely voice in this film. We've all seen the kind of cinema he's come up with over the years. His films like 'Mandi,' 'Manthan,' 'Sooraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda' all have revolutionised the face of Indian cinema. And in 'Well Done Abba,' he has once again found a relevant subject, which even youngsters can relate with.

It's lovely to write for the youngsters because through your story, you can teach them the lessons of life.

It's very useful to be able to look inside the mind of a seven-year-old when you're writing for youngsters that age.

Know that there is so much more to you than your body. It's not just about perfecting the steps; you must trust your instincts to tell deep, emotional stories through the steps that you are performing.

I have 18 tattoos. My tattoos have kind of become their own person. Everybody does stories on them. It is risky to be successful in the fashion industry and to tat your body up, but I figured, the way that I made my career and the way that I am successful is because I have always been myself.

If you sit down and read with your kid, either having your child read to you or you reading to your child at a regular time each day, it deepens the relationship. You don't have to talk about stuff; the story will do that work for you.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

When you see a superhero that looks like you and lives in and fights in a neighborhood that is sort of like yours, it's empowering to a degree that makes you have hope. That is the power of storytelling, and that is the power of images.

I think what I love about the documentary process is that you bring yourself to the documentary. And hopefully that makes you ask good questions, and hopefully that makes you reveal a little bit about yourself as well.

Certainly in my youth there was lots of singing, lots of storytelling, and whenever we went to a party, you had to do a party piece, like sing songs, recite poems, or tell stories. That sort of narrative musical culture was my upbringing.

As a filmmaker whose first film was made with the DIY tools of digital cinema, I love how the democratization of the filmmaking process and platforms like YouTube enables people to tell stories that in previous generations simply could not be told.

For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.

If you go on my Instagram, you're not going to see the same content you'll see on my YouTube. Instagram has become the new magazine. It's much more editorial and about perfect moments that are captured. Snapchats are funny, real moments that you want to share. On YouTube, it's more structured, more storytelling.

Even in the days of early YouTube, we always focused on narratives, and we always focused on franchises. We didn't do a lot of vlogging and stuff like that.

I'm not trying to brag, but if I did expose my life, it would be a good YouTube series.

When I build for YouTube, there isn't necessarily an end goal. I have an idea of how I want a thing to work, but if it doesn't work that way, I can always adapt the story. The story is the main driver, not the machine.

In making YouTube videos, you can't just be an actor, you have to also know the shots and how to write.

That's always the trick with the sequels, is how much do you repeat from the first one. Because we all get bummed out when you go see a sequel and it's beat for beat.

Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.

The trick of 'Up' was to balance the sad stuff with the silly stuff.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.