Fede Alvarez Quotes

There's a real art to telling a story in two hours, and that will always be something that people are very, very interested in.

The dynamics of storytelling are very important. To just be serious and morose all the time would be not very enjoyable.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

Comedy, drama, Westerns, sci-fi... it's all fine if the story's compelling and the character is interesting to me. I do like action a lot.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it's a good film.

So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved, because the movie is almost always bad when you do that. Your job No. 1 is for it to be entertaining, and if it's inspiring, that is great, too.

All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we're big on plot because that's the easy way to do it.

Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

Without a good story, a franchise won't work.

Dialogues and emotion based movies don't always work.

People don't come to the theatres to watch a kiss. It's the story that appeals to them.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.

Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.