Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.
Your father tells you a story when you're a kid, or your mother or your uncle or whoever it is. You sit there with your mouth open, and your mind goes to all these places they're telling you about that you've never seen, and you're agape. You just can't believe that things can happen like that - but it's just so direct.
When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.
My job is to get to the heart of a story, to find out what's really going on; to get it verified and, then, to get it out to as many people as possible as fast as.
I'm definitely drawn to stories of just regular folks, just generally in some kind of horrific situation. I keep saying I want to do a love story in the south of France with a boy and girl and some wine. Then I always end up in an oil rig with four hundred guys or on a mountain with guys shooting at each other.
Nursery rhymes were political when they were first written! To me, that's what it's about: it's about using it to say something more than just what the story is.
If you like a story that's totally different and won't know which way it's going... where it's go ing to end up and which way it's going to take you, then I think my work fits the bill.
The story is also about the battle between Arthur and the Saxons. The Saxons were destroying everything they came across and Arthur was left when Rome was falling because this movie takes place in 400 A.D.
This story, I predict, will grow to be worse than Watergate. The American people need to have the answers.
I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
Each environment has its own signature. Sound tells a story: You make choices about what you're hearing, where to look, how you want to feel about what's going on.
When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.
People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.
I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
I love people who have a good sense of humor, tell a good story, tell a good joke.
You want people to feel something when you tell a story, whether they feel happy or whether they feel sad.
As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.
Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.
'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
I believed my story would be helpful to young women my daughter's age, who are still in the process of forming themselves as women, and in need of encouragement to remain true to themselves.
She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.
You have to live what you write, or you have to know it. There are exceptions, like story songs, where you just have to have your facts straight. But I think you don't have to live a hard life to be a good or interesting songwriter.
I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don't get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.
Well, a lead is the most important thing about the story.
President Obama was asked not long ago to reflect on any mistakes he might have made. He said, well, 'I haven't communicated enough.' He said his job is to 'tell a story to the American people' - as if that's the whole problem here? He needs to talk more, and we need to be better listeners?
Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.
I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up - and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.
If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.
You're telling the story, creating the sets, doing the lighting, the designing, and establishing the pace.
The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.
I'm playing a very strong character, it's the story of the woman Polish Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto. I've just begun my weapons training and the SAS type training that's getting me fit.
For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.
