Steven Seagal Quotes

The trick to making a story matter is that every now and then, somebody you care about has to go. If it's somebody that you don't care about, then it doesn't really have - the stakes aren't there. But if you do that every now and then, then the story matters to people. And there are actual stakes involved, emotional stakes.

It's an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel - it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.

I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross, whether it's Brutus doing it to Caesar or Bob Stack doing it to Robert Ryan that defines what kind of drama it is.

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

Big stories need human stakes.

What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!

So I decided to move that scene in the doctor's office to two-thirds into the movie, after the viewers had come to know Ryan and Ali and share in their happiness.

I prefer drama; I think character-driven drama is my favorite kind of stuff to go watch, and I like being challenged by that kind of stuff in that way.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

I think lighting is a reflection of what is at stake emotionally in a movie.

If the crew is hit by the situation that we're trying to portray, I think we get a real and a stronger moment with the camerawork and the actors.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

Here's the point - and Jonah Goldberg reminds us of this. He wrote a blog post that was titled "The MacGuffinization of American Politics." Do you know what a MacGuffin is? "'In a movie or book, 'The MacGuffin' is the thing the hero wants,' Ace writes." So in the Maltese Falcon, for example, the hero wants the Maltese Falcon, but there's always somebody trying to stop the hero from getting what he wants.

There's always a villain in every book, in every movie. In every story you have the hero and what he wants, and that is the MacGuffin. The whole thing is about who's gonna get the MacGuffin. This piece that this Ace of Spades blog wrote is that's how the media covers [Barack] Obama, and I have observed this in different ways over the years.

Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

I have a bad habit, in the shows that I run, of killing off the people that I love.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

Contrast is the dramatist's method.