Edward Zwick Quotes

I like films to be complete in their written form.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

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

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

It always comes down to script and characters.

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

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

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.

The luxury of television is that you get more than one shot at who you think the guy is that you're playing.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.

When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.