Storytelling Challenges Quotes

Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'

Every time I make a movie I have too many characters and too many locations.

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?

I think you have to serve a lot of masters when you're doing a video game: you're not just telling a linear story or doing something that's all action.

It's very hard to dramatise something factual and not make it look overdone, but also not to make it look so under-dramatised that it's dull.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

I know, we can barely fit them in. That is a big challenge. Treating four lead characters equally, within a 30-minute format, is definitely challenging.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

Telling a story is like trying to eat grapes with a fork. It's always trying to get away from you. And if you're a good author, and you've challenged yourself, and you're telling big stories, there's more and more that's trying to get away from you simultaneously.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

I know, on 'Rick and Morty,' we had the time where they unfreeze time, and they're in trouble because of it. The time starts splitting. That episode, we got a little too focused on 'how,' the hows and the science behind it, and oh my God, it was - it was spiraling us for sure.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

We don't feel pressure of, 'Let's make this really raunchy.' It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us.

How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it

It's hard when you make a film from a book that so many people love, because there's no way to get the entire story into a two-hour movie. But I was pleased with the reaction [for Kite Runner].

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

The journey of filmmaking is so amazing. You start off with great confidence, and develop insecurity at the time of release. When you are ready with the finished product, you are constantly wondering if you have been honest to the story you started out with, if you got what you wanted. One is too close to the project by then to be objective.