Greta Gerwig Quotes

I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.

A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

With 'The Humans,' I've found that because it's related to very familiar forms - the family play and the thriller, almost a genre-collison play - some people want it to be one or the other. Either less dark and more of a family comedy or a full-fledged thriller with blood and ghosts jumping out of closets. Everyone's taste is different.

Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.

Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.

You set up a story and it turns inside out and that is, for me, the most exciting sort of story to write. The viewer thinks it's going to be about something and it does the opposite.

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

I've spent my whole literary career blurring boundaries between genres and categories.

A lot of art and visual crafts are based on appropriating things.

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.

I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

Only when my 'Punktown'-based stories began seeing print did I demonstrate my proclivity for blurring the borders between horror, science fiction, and other genres.

Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

There are no really new stories anymore.

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

I love fairy tale retellings and mash-ups.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

My personal feeling about reboots is - I'm very against it. I feel bad for the pop culture of this generation because I feel like they're getting a lot of retread... a lot of digested and vomited stuff from our teens and 20s and all of that.