Open-Ended Narratives Quotes

We are living in complex, difficult times and I wanted Syriana to reflect this complexity in a visceral way, to embrace it narratively. There are no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers. The characters do not have traditional character arcs; the stories don't wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open. The hope was that by not wrapping everything up, the film will get under your skin in a different way and stay with you longer. This seemed like the most honest reflection of this post 9-11 world we all find ourselves in.

I like films that don't have that unonimity of a response; that don't have consensus in the audience. What it is essentially for me is that if you go back and watch the film a second time, do you feel that you've been played fair with? Are all the clues in place? Indeed, sometimes these things are even overstated. Specifically, for that reason.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.

My movies are not movies of answers but of questions.

I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions . . .. Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.