Debra Granik Quotes

Once you get the right image the details aren't that important.

The funny thing is, whenever I'm working on something, I kind of forget there's a lot of people watching. It makes it easier to be in the moment and to tell a story as well as possible.

‎Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

You can't see the forest for the trees.

I can disappear into things very easily. But with acting, you have to be in the moment, and it gives me this incredibly fulfilling emotion: being really present.

The point of view is the biggest problem with games, because what we play must be clearly presented in the best way for me to have an immersive game experience.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

The big picture doesn't just come from distance; it also comes from time.

Drama is drama, and it's really... if it's something small, you put a magnifying glass up to it; if it's something big, you use a wide lens.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

As filmmakers, we're constantly always looking for something to bring the audience deeper into the reality of the story we're telling.

Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge.

There's people who watch shows while they're preparing their dinners, and they don't want to focus, and they don't want to be challenged, and whatever. And then there's people who want to really sit down and get into a character in a world, and feel like they're expanding, or they have complex relationships, or whatever.

When I'm writing something and I'm really into it, that's all I can think about, and it becomes the most important thing in the world to me, and it may not be that, in reality.

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

One should be constantly looking for the broader vision.

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

There's a lot of pressure and criticism in a crisis, but you can't miss the wood for the trees.

I look at everything from 100,000 feet.

Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.

I love writing fiction and can do it anywhere - I once even missed a flight because I was so engrossed.

As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.