Sam Esmail Quotes

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

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.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

You have a movie and it proves itself and then certain things happen.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

I try to mix the characters up and not be second guessed by the audience.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

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.

On TV, stories and events are finalized in 30 or 60 minutes, or neatly tied up after a season or two. The best stories are the ones that force us to come to our own conclusions and to explain why we believe in our conclusions.

I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things.

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.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

There are so many projects that you go into hoping the story works, and here comes a new third act and that kind of thing.