Josh Widdicombe Quotes

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

Every movie that I do, if you analyze the stories, you can notice that in each story, that within the movie after the first 15 minutes, it could fall apart. Or every 10 minutes it has the chance that you lose the thread. On the other hand, if you succeed in putting them together, then the movie looks spontaneous and more like cinema.

I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

The nature of a movie story is you have to keep charging forward and keep the audience with the story.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

I think the whole thing is: If it makes sense in your head, the audience will go along with it.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

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.

The real problem is arranging that experience in a way that tells a story, which is just incredible enough to be interesting, but credible enough to be believed.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

In 'Serena,' stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer's rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it's a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.

Every film that you make has to have a scene that is the heart that blood flows through in every other scene. That scene doesn't always have to be in the beginning of the film. But it can also be at the end, or in the middle, and that can sometimes make the film more effective.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.