Keanu Reeves Quotes

When I journal, I write about images that I've seen that I think might make good stories. I write about things that I hear that I think I can turn into a story. I write about the story that I'm working on and where I think it might go.

With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

I love working on scripts. I love coming up with ideas about what people would dress like or talk like. I love all that.

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.

There is this old thing that a lot of people say - that the worst experiences make the best films. I don't subscribe to it. But I've seen it happen.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Like most writers, I sit in a room and scribble a story and you don't have a connection with the people who take your story, whether it be to the stage or to the screen.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

When a bunch of stuff is happening on set, you have to remember the grander purpose: you're telling a story, so you have to get to that moment, and that takes supreme focus.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

I've toyed with this idea [of Fresh Hell] for a long time. I actually wrote a feature years ago with this sort of concept in mind, and it's gone through several incarnations, and... It wasn't 'til I met Chris Ellis, who directed me in a little thing that was actually for a ride in Universal Singapore, for those of you who happen to be going to Universal Singapore.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.