Gary Ross Quotes

When you have quick scenes, it becomes difficult to ascertain where your character fits and where they're going. I always enjoy scenes that have a movement to them.

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

I can talk endlessly about characters, or why someone did this or that, and what that dynamic and interaction is. I really love it, and I think that actors really respond positively to the fact that I like to talk about that stuff, because I'm not sure that all directors do.

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

Good directing is about getting the performance to be just what's right for the movie.

Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.

When I know what the character I'm supposed to play wants in general terms, and when I know what did the other characters want to do, that's when all these wills collide and the emotions show up.

In motion pictures, the actor rules. The camera served the actor.

Scene study is isolated. I suppose it's interesting, but I don't think it really teaches you about a throughline. A throughline is something you feel when you do one scene followed by another followed by another.

I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.

Actors will, in their mind, want to 'steal the scene,' and the problem is that means the scene didn't work in the first place.

Coming up in the School of Aaron Sorkin Delivery of Fast-Paced Dialogue and Hyper-Articulateness prepared me well for Shondaland, where there are many of the same factors at play.

If your character is written well and is meaty enough, even two scenes has the potential to stand out.

I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve 'Uncle Vanya' or find a solution for 'Henry V.' Plays aren't puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.

With supporting roles, you just want really good actors that can make it bigger than what's there.

If you create a movie that is only character driven, with a weak plot, then you - as a director, you have to make sure you keep pushing the tempo.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

Working with George Miller was an education. It was eight college degrees in character development and directing all at once.

I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.

If there's nothing interesting about a character, people leave because there's no desire to see what happens.

I look at the story and see what I have got to do in the film. Sometimes the story is great, set-up is good but there isn't much for you to do. I don't want to do that.