Naseeruddin Shah Quotes

Screenwriting is about condensing.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

The reason most novelists are not good screenwriters is that you don't have time for a lot of details. Novelists can really create a richer experience for the reader and have many subplots. You only have 90 pages because each page is a minute of screentime. You have to have certain things happen by certain pages, a certain story arc in the movie.

I love writing shorter fiction.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.

Filmmaking, whatever the window dressing or the scale of a film may be, is eventually about telling a story.

The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today.

I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a wonderful story.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.