Story Context Quotes

As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.

I don't know, a lot of people go crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I don't like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like 'The Wire.' It's more about the state of things; it's not about the narrative of a person.

I'd like to think that the door is always open for just the best actor for the role, you know? Race or gender shouldn't have anything to do with it, unless the character or story is focused on that for some particular reason.

Luke Skywalker, right now, is the last Jedi. There's always wiggle room in these movies - everything is from a certain point of view - but coming into our story, he is the actual last of the Jedi.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.

I'm at the beginning of it. I'm Elektra's last job before the story kicks off.

I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.

A little bit of gratuitous violence in a well-thought-out story is fine.

The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.

In 'Divergent,' the story is about Beatrice Prior, and I play her brother.

I find it very hard to sit down and create an idea or especially a new character on command. Usually my characters evolve by accident out of some story context.

I don't like to read books where I feel as though I've stepped into the middle of things and don't know what's going on. I like to see characters I've met before, but I don't want to feel left out because I haven't read other books in the series.

Exposition has legitimate uses. It's the most efficient way to summarize background information, including necessary information about a character's history. It can set the stage well for a major dramatized event.

The framed tale is, in my opinion, one of the most natural ways to tell a story. If you think of it, the conceit of the frame-less story is actually the odd way of doing things. Without the frame, how do you know the context for a story?

There are some writers who don't write about people who do jobs. I'm not going to name them, but you watch one of their films, or you read one of their books, and you think, 'What job do they do?' They seem to have a nice house and a nice income. How have they got it?

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

Just because I’m telling a story about a woman losing faith is not my rebellion against what I grew up in. If anything, it really affected the way I approached the story, and in fact, approach everything. I don’t judge my characters.

When I'm writing about complicated subjects, it usually involves a world. It could be the world of Scientology or the world of Al Qaeda, or the world of counter-terrorism.I look for emblematic beasts of burden - what I call "donkeys" - who can carry the reader through this world. They serve a different purpose. Donkeys are not especially interesting or likeable, but they are serviceable. They will take you into this world. The distinction I'm trying to make is: It's not about them. It's about the world.

I love romantic comedies that are set in a world. It's not just a boy and a girl falling in love, out of love, and back in love.

Good journalism is crucial. Good journalism isn't easy so I think it's less about what story and more about the layers and context that need to be explored in the story. That's one of the reasons why I'm excited to be a part of CNN. This is the kind of place that you can do that.

We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there).

If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle.

It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record."

I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.