If you ask around, it's pretty easy to find someone who has a bank account overdraft horror story to tell.
I have actually been very fortunate to be able to make films on my own credit card without having huge funders behind me dictating how the story should be told.
A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
There can be a progression to the dream; there can be steps to it. When you dissect any successful person's story, it's really rare that it was all or nothing. It's steps, and I just try to remind myself of that in terms of the things that I want; it's like, everything is a step, leading you to where you need to go.
We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we're trying to tell or the shot we're trying to capture.
It's funny because the perception is that the typical 'X Factor' contestant is the person who's just working 9 to 5 and just decides to one day go and audition. So yeah, for me, it was a very different story.
Everyone has a different life story. Things happen rapidly for someone, and things move slowly for others.
I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.
I was 22 when my mother gave me the original box set of 'Roots' and she said, 'I want you to watch this.' I watched the whole thing back to back in the span of 24 hours. It had a profound effect on me. It felt like my story.
There's not as much oxygen in that hot gym and I think it's great for conditioning. I believe in a lot of boxing. You can train and work on the speed bag and heavy bag, but when you get in the ring with another fighter, it's a different story. Punches are coming at you, there's physical contact, muscle against muscle.
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
For me, it's nice to have a character who can never find love and have that be the running theme, but I think when you open the door to a story line about relationships, you open the door to another realm of comedy.
I was very blessed it was Steven Spielberg who made the movie. He was very much into the redemption side of the story. They asked him in an interview why he had owned the rights to this story for 20 years before he made the movie, and he said, 'I wanted to see what the real Frank Abagnale did with his life before I immortalised him on film.'
Lyrically, the most important thing for me is, how can I tell a cohesive story?
An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn't matter if you're a kid or if you're a grown-up, it doesn't matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.
Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.
The voice for 'Surly' is, of course, very close to my own voice, but it's informed a lot by this story, by the arc and the animation and working with the whole creative team on 'The Nut Job' in finding what really works.
I know I'm not going to book everything I go in on, and that's just the nature of the business. You have to keep hustling and not get down on it. You have to keep at it and find your way in. Everybody's story is different.
There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.
I'm not a racist, and I'm not a murderer.
I fell in love with Nawaz on-screen after watching 'Gangs of Wasseypur.' So my love story starts with him from there. I was quite nervous to act alongside him. He is an excellent actor.
Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.
I have photographed sharks in waters around the globe, and I always want more and yearn to peer deeper into their world. To feed my passion and to raise awareness, I developed a story about sharks for 'National Geographic' magazine.
When you're editing, you're putting it together in a way that makes sense metaphysically. You're not inventing it, but you're finding the story that's there. You're making a play that's eventually going to go on stage and present itself to an audience. You want to show what happened, not exactly what you have evidence of happening.
A choreographer deals with the movement that you create, and with a creative director it's about the story, the stage, the lighting, the costuming, executing someone's idea, choosing how far to go or how little to go, and blending it so that you feel it, you're emotionally effected.
It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.
If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
I'm astonished by how much journalists stay with the story, try to get to the truth of the story, maybe give years of their life to it, maybe go over to Syria, maybe lose their life. Then, the next day, it's a new story.
I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.
I wouldn't say I'm personally trying to transition from comedy into drama. I don't look at things like, 'Oh, I need to do a drama now.' I get a lot of material sent to me, and if I feel like something has the creative integrity and the right director and the right whoever involved, the right actors and is a great story, then I do it.
For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'
I love looking back at my old pictures and pictures of my grandma and my mom and see how they expressed themselves at different parts of their lives, and it just tells an interesting story, so why not play around?
