Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

Part of the responsibility of being a modern storyteller is understanding modern audiences and trusting what they can handle. It's not just settling into what we think they want.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.

There is always this quarrel about what is preferable: the straight, naturalistic, epic storytelling or the modernistic, disjointed, slightly hermetic one. To me it does not matter, as long as it's good. I like both kinds. Although the common reader seems to prefer the first, which is to be expected, and who would blame her?

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can't in 22 minutes with a laugh track.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

I think 'Trial & Retribution' as a brand can go on forever. Its joy is that it has, to an extent, a formula, which gives a comfort routine for viewers. But we allow our directors total autarchy in putting their personalities on their stories.

European films were what it was about for me - the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can't really find in American films.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

It's incredible to see the creativity, beauty and hardships people capture when filmmaking is opened up and shared with the world.

I strive to make movies I would enjoy.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film... at least in Hollywood studio films.

Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.

I would not have so many scripts being driven by demographics. The play's the thing - not the 18-35 year old male age group.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.

Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways.

I'm not saying anything that's unknown, but movies are always cut down and there's a lot of complexity within the film that is not always widely accepted by the general audience, which is just a reality; a movie of a certain size, they don't want people to be too - it's a balance of how deep to keep going with these ideas.

I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.