Jennifer Carpenter Quotes

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

Every film is a journey.

Well, I think it's important to have some kind of a narrative engine that pushes the audience through the landscape. But I love films like 'Apocalypse Now,' which is a very mood driven film. It's a magnetic force that's pulling them through.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

Once you get into a feature, whether it's a sequel or an original one, you have to start all over again, and you're creating a world, creating new characters. You're also tracking emotions. You're trying to create emotion and create a character that you can fall in love with for two hours.

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

I don't really make movies with an intention other than asking myself, 'Do I love the character, and do I love the story?'

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

There's a reason a happy ending is called an ending. The trick of a television storyteller is to find all the rivers and mountains and valleys on the way to that ending.

A good movie makes the audience feel like they've journeyed with the characters.

When I write a film, all I think about is where the thing ends and how to get the audience there.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character's arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you're sort of powerless to what happens.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.