Because I'm not doing it for the money, I'm doing it because I feel like that story needs to be told or clarified, or something needs to be shown about that.
I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archeological dig.
I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria.
I've always been a fan of movies well before I got involved in the industry. The magic that it brings and being able to, I guess, escape your troubles, escape whatever is going on in life and getting to live in this moment and in the story and live in the lives of these characters.
I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.
I come from a school of people, folk singers, and the tradition there is troubadours, and you're carrying a message. Now admittedly, our job is partly just to make you boogie, just make you want to dance. Part of our job is to take you on a little voyage, tell you a story.
New York in a way functions as another character within the story, as it does within most of Woody Allen's stories.
The mini-series 'The Bronx is Burning' thoroughly embarrassed me the way the story was told.
The right costume determines the character, helps the actor feel who he is, and serves the story.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
Dan Rather is guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded.
'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.
People like it when others are gossiping. When you hear a story about someone's demise or some big faux-pas they made, everyone wants to tune into it, because it's nice to know that someone else made a mistake. It makes you feel elevated for a moment.
Everyone knows me and my wife's story. We didn't have sex until we got married.
Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
The Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has just published the story of her life. I confess that it is not in my reading table.
Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.
Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.
In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.
The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.
I try to approach all episodic work the same. No matter the content. I look for a dramatic or emotional spine to the story I'm telling, something that stands out to me thematically about the episode and its relationship to the rest of the season/series.
I wish I had a funny story.
I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.
I know how to hit a mark without looking. I instinctively know where my eye line should be. That's all 100%. But your character and the story are always different, so the emotional part is not muscle memory. You're still surprised by stuff and get the adrenaline.
That's always been my test for what makes a story: is this something journalists would gossip with each other about?
I think with drama, at least for me, my process, there's a lot of thought. I do a lot of back story. I listen to a lot of music. I'm very committed to a process when it comes to drama, but with comedy, I think it's really about letting loose.
You'll work hard to create characters that are compelling and unforgettable. But in the end, it's the story that matters.
My dad knows how to tell a story. He'd make me laugh by doing all the different voices.
I had a blast writing the Ranger in 'The Great Dinosaur Rush' for the Moonstone collection. The story turned out to be twice as long as it was supposed to be, but I was having fun. I even showed the Ranger in his 'old prospector' disguise, and I had some nice exchanges between the Ranger and Tonto.
I am quite a dreamer, and usually when someone tells a story, I tend to get distracted easily.
Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.
