Tony Gilroy Quotes

Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

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.

There are very few films that work like a novel.

I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

I think Kurosawa was one of the first storytelling geniuses who began to change the narrative structure of films.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

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

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.

Movies tend to be dislocated and non-linear in their process.

An editor does not just join shots. He creates emotions out of the shots.

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.'

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.

The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.

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.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.