I always wanted to tell the story of how Pearl Jam is the story of lightning striking twice. As well as being the flipside of the classic rock tale where great promise ends in tragedy. This is where tragedy begins great promise.
The story behind every song is individual to itself.
Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.
'180' is a romantic film, but I don't think it can be classified as a fluffy love story. It is a wonderful story with a script that is layered and more complex than the normal ones.
You kind of hope that the events themselves are interesting. I think that's what you have to hope for, that on a broad level it's an interesting story.
But after that, I was extremely happy with the story and the look of the show at the beginning of season two - everything was working together. I felt like it was finished conceptually.
My role is to just tell the highest degree of truth with every character and every story. From there, I have no clue whatsoever how things are going to turn out.
I've directed enough in the theatre and a couple of films to know that - to feel fairly secure that if I find a story that I really like I can probably get it done somewhat.
It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing.
It's a story about victory that will touch the lives of everyone who watches it. It's powerful.
The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.
World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
To step on a bomb, have your legs blown off and survive, is lucky. Everybody has a good-luck story. Mine was the fact that the senior medic was on patrol that day. Those who don't have a good-luck story are the ones who don't make it.
The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.
I just heard a story from someone the other day where somebody was beaten up by Christians for wearing one of our shirts. Of course, that's a very Christian thing to do.
Figuring out a way to balance the Boxer story with the Chinese Christians was difficult.
Having the Stitch character, the villain that becomes a hero, coming from outer space, it took a very difficult and complex story and put it into a simpler, kinder time.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
Pakistan never valued Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan saab until English songwriter Peter Gabriel started collaborating with him. After that, the country suddenly realised that they have an amazing talent. This is the story of a lot of artistes there.
You can't always see both sides of the story. Eventually, you have to pick a side and stick with it. No more equivocating. You have to commit.
I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.
The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.
My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman.
I have spent some time talking to Rex Tillerson. He's an amazing human being. He's an American success story, not just in his business life. He's a rags-to-riches success story. He stated working at 8, lived in a one-bedroom house until the time he went to college, and grew to become the CEO of one of the world's largest companies.
Everyone has a story that makes me stronger. I know that the work I do is important and I enjoy it, but it is nice to hear the feedback of what we do to inspire others.
Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
In my standup work, I always do these characters, older people who are just off to the side. It's easier to write a story about the guy who made it to the top, but the middle is so much more interesting, so much more murky.
I read 'The Hobbit' while at school. It was OK; can't really remember too much from there, other than the fact I was 10! I never read it again until the script for the film, but it has to be an amazing story when you know Sir Peter Jackson has made three films out of it.
One feels the excitement of hearing an untold story.
I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the 'honesty' of the story.
I can't write my life story without Emmitt and Troy. They can't write their life stories without me. We're tied together forever. This is a day to remember for the rest of our lives.
The first movie was mostly about George and Julia. This one is mostly about me and Catherine and our love story and our whole history. So it's a very different movie.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.
