storytelling method Quotes

I'm basically a fairly traditional filmmaker.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

I'm frustrated when I see movies in which I feel like the plot is being told to me instead of shown to me.

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

I'm never writing as a character.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

I'm really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.

When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

[The way Stanley Kubrick] tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories.

I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.

I thought it would be more interesting to make a musical autobiography than an actual autobiography.

When I initially read the script, it goes inside and comes out different things even without commenting on any stuff. And then, those pieces are taken out and then spread out through the movie.

When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.

We're always aiming for storytelling that feels a bit surreal.

The difference between one writer and the other, or one director and the other, is the way he deals with a scene.

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.

There are certain things that I will do viscerally to affect people emotionally, with speed changes and sound, and various other things. Sure there are links; the same kind of sensibilities went into it and I worked on writing that script as well so there was an emphasis on a minimalisation of dialogue as far as possible, to focus on the visual and to put it in another language, of course.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

As a writer, I find that a good way of evolving a character is through an examination of his or her defining relationships - and what's more defining than a relationship with someone you love?

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.

I got offered to do a book yeah, and they said to me, 'Gem, you're so busy, how about we get someone to walk around with you with a dictaphone,' and that's how we did it.

Almost everyone shuts down when science becomes too technical; you've got to infuse it with entertainment and storytelling to make it effective. From high school on, science is taught in a very dry manner, which isn't as potent.

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.