Quotes About Storytelling

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

What do you know? Haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief?

Suspension of disbelief is a necessary ingredient in all storytelling. So it has been with the government's narrative that it is delivering Brexit.

A story has to have several layers to sustain audience interest in each episode.

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

There's some beautiful filmmaking on television. I'm getting a lot of my artistic sustenance from what's happening there.

I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.

At a personal level, I rather like it if you can create characters and storylines that don't have to rely on being crude and swearing.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

Animation is incredibly difficult - much like doing a giant sweeping fantasy novel.

I often begin movies with music in my head; it's a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don't like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures.

I remember on 'Jug Face' working with Chad Crawford Kinkle, who is as sweet as they come. He told me someone had given him advice that if you're making a drama, you basically need to put your main protagonist through living hell in every scene, and then you'll have a successful film. He laughed it off until watching me every day!

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

Swimming has been a very effective medium for telling a story about the state of our planet.

And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap.

I always think it's interesting to switch genres, because if I read a script and I know exactly how to manifest a story, I don't really want to do it anymore, because I've already done it in my head.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

Media is a double-edged sword and has the power to change hearts and minds through authentic storytelling as well as the power to paint a person, or an entire community, in a dim and misleading light.

'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.

For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

You can't tell a Batman story without the Joker, and you can't tell a Joker story without Batman. They're just the symbols of the best and worst of humanity.