Thematic Exploration Quotes

I think there's been a tendency to place me in what has been characterised as the 'moral centre' of the film. In films like 'The Ice Storm' and 'The Crucible' and 'Nixon,' that's the sort of the persona that emerged.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

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.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

Some actors pride themselves on disappearing into a role. I'm into the game because I like experiencing and exploring themes, so I put a lot of myself into the person.

I can't make a movie unless I believe in the themes behind it. I mean, that's the first question I ask myself, always, is, 'What is this movie about?'

I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

'A Perfect Place' is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for 'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' did not want that at all.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

I think main storylines are what always intrigued me, with those that were the relationships between the characters against whatever backdrop, whether it was in an ordinary universe or a universe in the future.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

I think that when you're exploring themes of humanity and what defines a hero and what makes us our best self and what makes us our worst self, you're going to stumble into territories of societal issues and that kind of thing. Sometimes you have accidents where you're not trying, but then the opportunity just presents itself. and you lean into it.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

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

My earlier books, 'The Oath,' 'This Present Darkness' were pretty straight adventure. 'The Visitation' is like a deeper book, more thought-provoking. It probes at character more.

There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

As a writer, I think I'm mainly interested in contemporary themes, so when I create my own stuff, it's inherently that. But as an actor, I would like to do lots of different things. I would love to play someone completely different from myself in a costume drama.

A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know.