Everyone in Hollywood wanted a role in this movie. Everyone wanted to have a part in it. I feel so lucky that I got one, but what I find so cool about 'Hunger Games' is that the real star is the story itself.
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman.
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
In rare cases, I've had music before I shot the movie. I think that for 'Good Will Hunting' I had an Elliot Smith record or a couple of them and I just somehow felt like the sound had something to it that reminded me of the story. So in that case there was music beforehand.
The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.
I had a director who told me a story about a fan who had commented on how nice it was to see her sister laughing and how happy the show made her. I like to make people happy and make them laugh.
Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.
Bankruptcy is about financial death and financial rebirth. Bankruptcy is the great American story rewritten. We're a nation of debtors.
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.
The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.
As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.
I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?
I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of 'Supergirl' and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don't want it to be the same as the Superman story.
When a story or part of a story comes to me, I turn it over in my mind a long time before starting to write. I might make notes or take long drives or who knows what. By the time I give myself permission to write, I know certain things, though not everything. I know where the story is headed, and I know certain crucial points along the way.
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.
I love being part of a company, and telling a story.
The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher Mrs. Crandall gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I loved doing it. I started working seriously at becoming a writer when I was seventeen.
I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.
The professionalism of wire service reporters is constantly being tested because reporters know that if they're late or sloppy on a story, it will show up because the competition is likely to be not late and not sloppy.
Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger. We would see Facebook on every single laptop in class. We knew there was a bigger story here.
The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.
Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.
The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.
But why should I read what somebody else thinks of my life when I know the real story?
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
As an actor, you know when you've got great material in front of you. When you're working, you think, 'Is this the one? The one that everyone will respond to and be moved by?' You pray that you have told the story well... that your peers will see it and audiences will love it.
The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.
To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.
To me, White Boy Shuffle is sort of like Catcher in the Rye, the story is so universal.
