Terry Hayes Quotes

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

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

I've dropped myself into straightforward character pieces in order to explore that form and reap its values. But you are sort of restricted visually when your first requirement is to tell a fairly straightforward story.

I like doing movies that relate to people's experience.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

The film industry is mostly about unidimensional characters.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

Because there is actually something very interesting in Goodfellas, how the style of the film changes as time goes by and based on the mental state of the protagonist.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

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

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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.

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.