Edward Zwick Quotes

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story. That seems to be forgotten. Many films today just rely on special effects and they have an explosion every five minutes. Who needs it? It's rather repetitious.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

People love to be told stories, but it's the sugar that draws you into the theater.

There are very few films that work like a novel.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

A great director is someone who makes you feel like you're moving forward.

I am interested in people. I'm interested in telling stories, whether that is behind the camera or in front of the camera.

There's something about film that offers this opportunity to stick to a very, very clear single protagonist's point of view, and I like that.

I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it's kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.

TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

Sometimes there's a disjoint between what works on the page and what works with visual story telling.

All of the good movies are based on how that story was told. And you cannot do it with a bad script, that's for sure, no matter who.

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.

People just want good stories.

And if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that cool props and special effects are not enough. Story comes first. Everything depends on story.

It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.