As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
Whether politicians are dealing with complex policy problems or trying to communicate with the electorate, it makes sense to establish a clear, long term narrative underpinned by forward-looking policies to deliver on its vision.
I love to dress up and create a narrative with my look.
I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.
I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.
I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.
'Dhruva' is not a first person narrative of Siddharth Abhimanyu.
As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.
Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.
As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.
I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
Most people just half-watch TV. They watch TV while they are doing many other things in the environment of their home. So, what they are doing goes through their ears as much as through their eyes. In television, the narrative and characters are in the foreground of everything, because you are watching TV as you do other stuff.
There is nothing more worrisome to ISIS than cooperation between 'the West' and the Muslim world, for it defies the narrative of a clash of civilisations the group is trying to revive.
I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.
One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing - that science has no evidence of, by the way - called free will.
Each country has its own way of communicating a narrative and, through that, expressing family experiences in emotional stories.
Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.
I actually did an Agatha Christie monologue for my audition showcase at Guildhall, and that's how I got my agent. Some people said 'ooh it's old hat' and 'too risky'. Some people think she's all about the narrative and thriller aspect at the expense of character and I disagree. I did it anyway and it worked well.
Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don't understand but they can't stop looking at.
The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
Whatever storytelling muscles you've developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.
I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.
I used my instincts. It's very easy to imagine how you'd feel, actually. I just had to tell the narrative.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
I think when you go in, with film or television, you want to tell this narrative. And with 'Joshy,' you want it to be grounded with moments - it's not like, 'Everyone be as funny as you can, quickly, at all times!' It's not like that. You have to pick the right improvisers.
I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.
As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.
If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.
I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.
American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative.
There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.