We fell in love with different people. Looking back, we might have done it in a different order, but we got invested. We really wanted to do the flashbacks because we wanted to explore who these women were on the outside versus the inside, and get a fuller picture of the masks we wear.
After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.
Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.
Getting trapped back in the '80s, it's almost like a comic nightmare, which for me is a very real nightmare. Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.
Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own.
In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.
People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.
Normally, if I would read in a script that there's mostly flashbacks and mostly voiceover, I would run as far away as possible.
Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.
One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves.
Tell me where are the flashbacks they all warned us would come?
I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.
Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.
You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.
My memories of events and games are fragmented.
When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.
How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid.
Everyone always told me that I had the symptoms of a P.O.W.
As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.
In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks.
Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!
The tradition, particularly in old-school British detective things, is everybody's in the drawing room or the library, and they're all gathered, and the detective walks around and tells them where they were that night, and you see the flashbacks.
