Catherine Hardwicke Quotes

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

Usually, when I read something, I'm looking for the story first. And then, when I re-read it, I check every part of it to see whether every scene is necessary. You imagine yourself watching the movie, to see whether or not you're losing the through-line of the story.

The narrative shouldn't stop for the song in a musical. The music has to continue the narrative of the storytelling.

I think every character is important in every film - be it small, primary, or lead - because they are adding something to the story, taking it forward.

I think love is a great catalyst for many characters to further the story or their own growth.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you're constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

So in the drafting process, whenever I would discover something about what my character wanted or didn't want, I immediately just wanted my character to admit to that so I could get to the next, more interesting level in the story.

Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.

I personally adore origin stories - they're so intriguing, learning what shaped and formed a character.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story

Doctor Strange is an origin story so there's a certain room for me improving as well as the character improving.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

You can't feel sorry for a scene. If the movie works without the scene, then you don't need the scene.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

Every episode has a purpose to move the story forward.

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

Also, as an author, character has always been what I'm most interested in - much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.