Multiple Storylines Quotes

Duets is about six people, so it's like three different movies - three different duets. I was on the set 18 days, spread out over three and a half or four weeks.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

'Game of Thrones' has multiple story lines, multiple countries, and it's complete fantasy.

I quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them.

I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.

'Modern Family' is unique in that it's telling the story of three different families, which is a huge amount of characters to service.

Once I'd worked out that I couldn't possibly expect people to enjoy a monstrous, 3000-page book, I realised I could in fact create a labyrinth of a story with four different points of entry. But what interested me was creating something that would rearrange itself every time you read one of the other books. So depending on which order you read them, the implications and angles would change. To get that right, each one of the books had to have its own personality and texture -- even though they are connected, they are very different creatures.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

An eight-hour movie is definitely not a two-hour movie. An eight-hour movie is really like five independent films, if you think about it, because each is usually an hour and a half. In some ways, it is like making a movie. It's just a lot more information.

I never saw the premise as 'Godless' is the story of a town full of women. I always saw 'Godless' as being made up of a lot of intersecting, related stories that literally meet in the final episode.

I've done movies in the past that have so many characters and I find it's very hard to follow all these stories. You end up not caring about any of the people and I thought that would be the case in this film, and you had these big speeches for each character, you know, it's like "God that's how you'll have to cut that down in order to paste it all", to edit the movie and my representatives could say "no, you really you ought to check it out.

One of the things that I love about Robert Altman's movies is that, really, a Robert Altman movie is just a bunch of short films about various people told at the same time.

The fun thing about writing a book with multiple paths and multiple endings is you really get to explore the characters and figure out their different fates.

I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces.

I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'

'Amores Perros' is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident.

I'm often associated with parallel narratives or dual narratives. The 'Devil in the White City' was a fluke.