Jonathan Nolan Quotes

I've often written about places that are totally different from anything I know. Sometimes they turn out better.

Look at the people who are coming to television Ridley Scott, Ang Lee or Guillermo del Toro - all these great filmmakers - actively put themselves back into TV. That's because the environment is very encouraging for bold storytelling, storytelling that you've never seen before.

TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.

Whatever field you can do that, that's where you want to do it, and I think that's why people like David Fincher and Ridley Scott are interested in it, too, because when you sit down on a meeting in HBO and they're like, "More, more." You're just like, "Oh yeah, I love this." Sometimes it's a little harder in film. I think also it's a great audience, take advantage of it. It's a great audience.

As a producer, I really get to tell stories that I care about in a way that I want to. I get to shape them. I get to choose the collaborators. That's really gratifying as a storyteller. And also, frankly, it's really fun to create jobs for other people.

It's fun, working with different people, everybody works differently. When I have time off from music, I want to make other music. That's what I do, that's what's fun, that's what makes me happy.

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.

I like directing much better. It's more fun, that's all there is to it. It's essentially the same job, which is storytelling, but you have more control over the way you want to tell the story. It's a high. I love it.

I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

I think I've done a lot of movies that people would like to have seen a sequel to. But I grew up in a time when we didn't do sequels. You just did a movie because you wanted to do a movie and you wanted to tell a story. It wasn't to build a franchise.

I enjoy telling these stories that I ultimately think get a disservice on a lot of network television. I enjoy getting people to change their perspective. I enjoy pushing myself into learning and understanding things from a very different point of view. It's scary to do that. It's scary to kind of put yourself in somebody else's position.

Because you make a world that didn't exist before, and you can go into that world deeper and deeper. It's unbounded out there. One film takes you into one area, another film takes you into another area. There could be trillions, zillions of worlds that exist in the big space.

I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

I really enjoy directing television because you get to work in so many different genres and with different people.

It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

I'm just trying to make the point that the story we're telling ourselves is often very different from the story we're telling the people around us.

Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well.

What is life unless you're having a good time? I don't really have a plan; I just try to dip my toes in different ponds.

The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.

We [Rodriguez and Frank Miller] wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same.

It's sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking.

If something depressing is happening, that's gold. That's the best possible situation you could be in. But if that doesn't happen, you just have to make up stuff - it's more fun because you have more freedom with what you can write about. You can invent characters and situations. It's actually easier.

It's always so much fun to create backstory. Even if there are more clues in the script, you still always have to invent a lot for yourself. I think that comes naturally.

I think something that's so amazing, and why I really wanted to get into modeling, was to be able to travel, to be able to see the world and live in this glamorous world and meet all these different people.