Dramatic Arc Quotes

People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it.

If you're doing a drama that has some comedic elements you can't forget that it's primarily a very serious film that has some light relief.

I'd get bored if I... if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.

Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.

Actors are really working with bodies, with their minds, and with their emotions. Feelings, basically. That's what movies are about, going from one feeling to another.

I am keen to work in romantic stories and dramas.

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.

I have done comedy and now I did a negative role. So for future I guess I wanna do an emotional character and make my audience cry.

I look at whatever the finish line is for the character and then kind of act backwards from that and play him in such a way so that that finish line is more rewarding.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

A play is not a tweet. It can't be compressed and embedded, and it definitely can't be delivered apologetically.

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.

The definition of a musical is that the emotion is so strong that you can't talk anymore, you have to sing. The emotion isn't strong enough when you're just like, 'Let's take a second to sing about lamps!'

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

But on stage you're able to just take the character from one point to the end and it's a fluid, organic piece. It's about being completely present all the time, right there in the moment.

I have not only played light-hearted roles, but many times, I end up playing this annoying girl in films.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

What's the classical moment that every actor or actress deals with? A tragic thing. They get that blank, faraway look in their eyes. But in life, it's not that way.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

The narrative shouldn't stop for the song in a musical. The music has to continue the narrative of the storytelling.

We've always had the sensibility that you work on the set, and you structure it, much like a play, where once you've got the lines down and blocking right, you freeze it, and then you go out and do what you're doing night after night. You want to structure something that has form and that builds the right dynamic from start to finish.

That's an actor's dream to get something meaty and juicy and challenging to work on.

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre.