Martin McDonagh Quotes

At the beginning when you're writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it's 4 four hours long, you realise that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

I just think a lot of movies are too long. I want to know how to make my movie as tight as possible.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.

For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I don't believe in director's cuts where you make things longer. The coolest thing was when the Coen brothers did a director's cut of 'Blood Simple,' and they made it shorter.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.