Richard Corliss Quotes

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

I think TV is all about caring, and if you don't care about a character in a drama or a person when they get voted out of a reality show, it's bad TV. I wouldn't care if you dropped a bomb on the 'Big Brother' house.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

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.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

Film is drama. You've only two hours, so you lie by exclusion, and try to make up for it by portraying the environment.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

There's an arc to an action sequence, and you need to come out the other end knowing your character better, and maybe the story has moved forward in a compelling way.

Whether it's Brad Pitt up there, if there's a good moment up there, and you get pulled into the emotion, you're not thinking, 'Oh, that's Brad Pitt. He's an actor, and he's famous.' That's kind of the nature of storytelling, right? You sit around the fire and tell a story, and you can get sucked into that story.

When you are working on a movie, you have to ensure that the journey of characters ends in two hours.

It's always useful to know that people are emotionally invested in a series because it means that you can take them down a certain road, and they should be interested.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

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.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

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.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.