Dev Hynes Quotes

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

I think about everything first. I think about the scenario: the story and the characters, what I'm trying to say and I'll think about that for a couple of days until it's all locked in and then when I get to an instrument it'll just fall out. But the song's kind of all ready there in my head.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

Music runs through everything I do - I even think musically; even when I was acting, but, especially, when I am directing. Directing is very musical.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

When you have the cast, the sets, the lights, an opera takes on its own life. I'm not one of those directors who marches in with a set of plans.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

I'm like the painter with his nose to the canvas, fussing over details. Gazing from a distance, the reader sees the big picture.

'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.

It took me three weeks to write the 'Rhapsody in Blue.' I had always wanted to write something blue and Paul Whiteman inspired.

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

What I like most about directing is creating a world more so than anything. To me, the music is the wrapping paper on that world.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

All the conductor has to do is stand back and try not to get in the way. Mozart is doing all the work.

If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.

I think so much of writing is an instinct, or a feel for a scene, or a feel for a character. You have to put into words the word 'tone,' which I think is thrown around a lot and can mean a hundred different things, but communicating that to other people is definitely a challenge.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?