Quotes About Storytelling

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

Some actors - myself included - like to know where your character's going: you like to know what the arc is for the character so that you can plan where you're going to give beats for this, that, and the other and give the audience what they want. But on 'Homeland,' you do the opposite.

Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.

Multi-camera's fun because you have the immediacy of the audience and just being able to tell the story more or less straight through. The thing I like about single-camera is that you have the luxury of shooting a lot of different options.

Watching something like 'Orange is the New Black' - the development of the characters is amazing. Or 'Breaking Bad' or 'Mad Men' - those shows went on for so long. You become so invested in those characters, and I think that's a pretty magic thing.

I'm an orator, a raconteur.

Telling my grandchildren stories of my growing up is some of our favorite times spent together. They want to know what it was like and what I did as a child. They seem to be especially interested in the organic and simplistic setting I grew up in.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

Fiction is organized gossip.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

I've always felt that really good prequels should be original movies.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

I originally went to school to be a filmmaker. And so it's a big part of how I think and how I write. And it inspires me a lot.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

You never make movies for Oscars.

For the most part, this record is autobiographical. At some point, the story of 'The Houston Kid' takes my experiences from 6 to 15 years old, and it sort of cross-pollinates with other kids in my neighborhood. It fuses their experiences with what was going on in my life.

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

It must have been so impossible to think about it and dare to do that, so they feel compassionate for her. I don't think the movie would work otherwise.