Laurence Fishburne Quotes

My belief is that if you start a film all the way up at level 10, you've got nowhere to go.

Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you've got to get to it and get to it now - get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.

I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

You cannot base a whole movie on just the imagery alone. It has to be the story and the characters.

We like drama. Even in our comedy, we like drama.

Violence is used to portray what happens in a film. It only helps portray the actors and what they do. I think it is more about the story, when you have something to play off of.

Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.

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.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

If you can have a great story that people can follow the mystery and get the suspense, and then you have those moments of tension and a splash of visual fun, then you kind of get everything. You get your money's worth.

In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

Even though you're filming something and it's all scripted, there's still a sense of ritual about it because you're filming a ritual. It has all these little details that you want to capture, and a very specific mood and tone.

The greater the darkness, the better the drama.

The mark of a writer is to make a story as likely as possible, and I've done my best to deliver authentic atmosphere.

I think the location is almost as important as casting the leads of the movie. The location on 'The Purge' was crucial to that movie working.

You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.

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.

Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don't think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere.

Feature film can have a major role in explaining ideas and describing peoples' lives and their struggles.

The essence to me of all good drama is argument.

I'm very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera - it's just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.

It's fun to play characters with a past, but it's also fun to play any role that is what I would call a 'pressure cooker' kind of character, where the lid is on, and it's left to simmer throughout the movie.

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.

In love stories you have to establish the mood and then you can go on. Writing thrillers are difficult because every scene needs a twist. May be comedy is even more difficult but I have no experience of it.