Kelly Asbury Quotes

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

Content films necessary don't go by the content, they go by the emotions. Content films are about content whether you want to portray the content or sell it through humour, through seriousness, is a choice of the filmmaker.

My job is not to make you happy. As a filmmaker and as an actor, my job is not to make you feel happy. If you're used to those kind of films, don't come and watch my films.

When I go for a project, I wonder what underpinning a project will have that's going to give the audience some emotional access to it.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

I get to play characters that kind of shock people and I enjoy doing that. I like characters that have meaning and get people in the heart. I want to be able to get people to cry or make people angry or sad.

I had a strong vision for 'The Best Man Holiday,' so I was able to translate that to the actors and ultimately to the screen. Things can't get too heavy or too outrageously funny; it has to strike a balance. Tone is everything. If you've set the right tone, you can get away with a lot of stuff. You can get away with making people cry.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

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.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

You can't tell any kind of a story without having some kind of a theme, something to say between the lines.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

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

Every director knows it is his job to be manipulative. When you make an edit, you are trying to manipulate.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

If you're going to make a statement, I think you should write it in prose and make a statement. If you have characters who are mouthpieces for a point of view, then you have to be very clever about disguising it.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

The best way to make a show that's going to resonate is to make a show that you'd love.