Thematic Depth Quotes

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

The privilege I've had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

I would never, ever change the formula of what we would do, but what I want to do is go down somewhere really conceptual. Really artistic. Really theme-oriented. But I don't want to push anything.

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

If you're going to do a show about somebody who dumped you, it's much richer if you have three characters dealing with different aspects of that theme. There is more space for people to identify with it.

I felt like challenging myself and challenging my readers with something darker and heavier. I don't know how to explain it, because I'm not a political person. I have two political stories, and that's it: 'Human Diastrophism' and 'Poison River.'

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

I can't imagine making something that is made only to be scary. For me, the darkness and scary material has to have meaning attached to it, or I can't invest the time and energy it takes to write and script or make a movie. It has to mean something.

It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.

In a book you can really talk about ideas and themes and characters in a deeper way than you can even on the screen.

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

I wanted to explore the possibility that this could have become 'Planet of the Humans and the Apes' instead of just 'Planet of the Apes,' so I wanted there to be this hope of connection as well as this inexorable pull towards what we know the series becomes.

The way you challenge Superman is by having things happen very, very quickly in different places and then asking, 'Who does he save first? What powers must he use to save each person or stop each disaster?' That's one of the ways you make him interesting beyond the thematic and moral issues that make Superman.

A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.

You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.

Every frame of a Coen brothers movie is filled with history and meaning, and the deeper you go, the deeper you get. That's why their movies stand up particularly well to repeated viewing and investigation.