Everywhere you go, there's a soundtrack. You can't really quite hear it. It's just a little out of the range of hearing.
Every movie has the thing it's about, and then, deep down, it has this thing that it's really about. 'Star Wars' is not really about a space opera, action, and the galactic quest. It's about self-doubt.
People say it's a movie about boxing, but... I don't agree at all. I don't think it's a movie about boxing. Boxing is like a platform. It's just a stage where this is played out.
We tend to talk about the world in a myriad of ways - a microscopic world of elementary particles, a biological world of organisms and evolution, a social world of morality and meaning. But it's all the same underlying world. That's the underlying theme of 'The Big Picture.'
Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon.
The beautiful thing about 'American Gods' is that it's very simple at its core.
Songs need to have a secret, cryptic, thematic thing about them, otherwise they are just messy and all over the place.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
I like shows or films or books that have messages but don't beat people over the head with them.
Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.
When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.
Any suggestion that I'm writing about political operatives because I'm interested in political operatives misses the entire point.
A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.
Sometimes with good writers you don't spot the theme, but when you come away you realise there has been one.
What I may intend for a story to communicate and what a story ends up communicating could be two different things. And it could be an even more positive thing.
For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.
The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.
A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.
And it's interesting, but I'm always interested in the story behind the story.
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
In entertainment, if you have a message in a film, no one wants to be spoon-fed the message. No one wants to be told how to feel. At least, I don't.
My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.
Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn't have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
My work is distinct and definitive and specific, and hopefully it is so that every single character is different, and they are - but there's probably an underlying element that's me.
