Alex Gibney Quotes

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

I prepared my intervention the night before I spoke. As it happened, there were about 44 cardinals who wished to speak but could not because there was not enough time. I was one of the last to speak.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

Whenever you're adapting something that's a 12- or 14-hour read down to something that has to be around two hours, there's going to be some cuts.

I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

When you wrestle on television, you're always fighting for time and the enemy is you're never getting enough of it, you're looking, trying to get more.

I love to be able to tell a whole story in three-and-half minutes.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

Even though 'SmackDown' has been kind of like the Internet darling, I believe that if they had three hours instead of two, they would find out that it's tough to be a darling when you've got that massive three-hour anchor around your neck.

If you're going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit and that you want to hit.

When you are working on a movie, you have to ensure that the journey of characters ends in two hours.

On one level, this was the biggest challenge out there - to make a film of this scope, in this amount of time, and to go into a different genre, essentially. Yes, I've done a vampire film, but 'Eclipse' is a very different kind of thing. This is a romantic story, which swings from a darker, more abject feeling to very pure romantic scenes.

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.

It's hard to prep a movie in five days and shoot it in five days and cut it in barely any time. You don't get quite enough time to make the thing, let alone tell the story.

Even in 'The Red Shoes,' a film that nobody ever has complaints about, there are enormous continuity bumps, and it doesn't matter. You know why? Because you're being carried along by the power of the film.

I have to make sure, when you start seeing a film, you are going to see it until the end. I have to, of course, entertain you a little bit. The real question is how far do I go?

I have always believed that television is a very strong medium to convey stories, stronger than even movies. On television, you have more scope to explore a subject as it gives you more time.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

My problem with both iterations of 'Dark Phoenix' onscreen, the original by Brett Ratner and the newer version by Simon Kinberg, is, I don't think you can do it effectively in 90 minutes.