Narrative Interpretation Quotes

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

I think that you can treat a classic like a museum piece -stuffed and mounted- or you can make it a living, breathing narrative that is unfolding right then and there.

It's only a story, isn't it?"... "Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?

In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound

I mean, yeah, Anne Fletcher was a choreographer, but she was born to be a director. You need to have the ability to figure out people's rhythms. It all starts from the script.

The director of 500 Days of Summer is doing the Spider-Man movie. That's not necessarily the movies I want to make, but it's all about the story, and if you connect to the story, and you feel you can tell that story better than anyone else, then great. Jon Favreau killed Iron Man, I loved it.

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.

Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

For me it's a very organic process. I read the script/hear a narration and pretty much know instantly if it's something I want to be a part of or not. It's really as simple as that.

I didn't ever think of it as a social thing at the time. I took it as a good story. Maybe because I've always been kind of progressive so I never thought of it, you know.

How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?

The meaning of the story is the story.

Personally I don't think there's any real intrinsic difference between comic books, movies, theatre, novels. I know there's sure to be some differences of some sorts. I've worked on novels, films, and video games, and in an adaptation, I guess one of the issues is that I have to be in love with the thing I'm adapting before I do it. So that can cause a problem. You can be too scared of it. You could be too reverential. But at the same time you want to try to capture this thing that you're obsessed by. You're fixated for a reason. What's the reason? You try to get ahold of it.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

I have always believed that an artiste needs to respond to a story first. One has to feel it in order to live it.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

My mother was religious; she was knowledgeable about mythology and scriptures; she could tell the metaphysical nuances and make the story come to life with their deeper significance. The current generation is missing out on this.