When I heard Edward Snowden's story, it reminded me of my mother in a strange way. She was in the French resistance from early on, 1941. At that time, the Resistance were considered troublemakers - even traitors - in France.
I think we have a perception of transvestites all being the same, as one block. It's not one mass or tribe. Everybody's got a different story.
My first customer is myself. When I tell a story I like, I can sleep easy. I'm sorry when audiences don't like it, but I have no choice.
Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.
I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.
To be able to create a character and tell a story is a crazy way to make a living. I feel so lucky to be able to do this.
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
Long-format television is a better way to tell a female story.
The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.
The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.
'The Master' with Joaquin Phoenix puts up a good fight, but my favorite movie of all time is 'The Wizard of Oz.' I just love it. I watched it over and over again as a child, and I think it has all the elements of wonder, and it's a beautiful story.
The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.
And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.
Nothing splendid was ever created in cold blood. Heat is required to forge anything. Every great accomplishment is the story of a flaming heart.
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery.
Eventually the story would spill over into the regular media.
It was, when I read it, I thought, such a beautiful script. I loved the story. I thought it was well handled. I thought it was even more moving because it was a true story and that made it even more poignant.
I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.
You can use martial arts to tell a different story. Ang Lee used martial arts in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' to talk about love.
Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.
I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.
My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
For me it was really important to get the essence out of the music for the story and not, sort of, press the music into the service of the whimsical telling of it.
I'm not the most famous guy in the world; my work is spread out across different mediums, and I never write the same kind of story and rarely even do the same character from one year to the next.
I like any story that starts one place and really takes a huge journey to a whole new place; that people in their life want to take that journey. They want to be able to find things in their life that aren't working and work through them to a new place of change.
I try to tell a story musically in a song.
I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.
I'm a storyteller - that's my chamber, that's my box. I'm always tryin' to give you the best story from our side of the table that you could really relate to quick. I understand where I wanna be at, but sometimes the production takes me where I need to go.
And it's interesting, but I'm always interested in the story behind the story.
I look for a good story. Usually the best stories are the ones that are unbelievably true. 'Soul Surfer' is one of those stories.
'Wicked Nights' is the story of Zacharel, the new leader of the Army of Disgrace - heavenly warriors in danger of falling from grace - and Annabelle, a human who has spent the last four years locked in an institution for the criminally insane.
A boy's story is the best that is ever told.
