Kevin Feige Quotes

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

But at a certain point you've gotta be ruthless with the movie because you can have these great scenes, but they aren't specifically building the story that needs to be built at that moment.

You can't feel sorry for a scene. If the movie works without the scene, then you don't need the scene.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Certainly as an actor, half of your work is not going to end up on the screen anyway, because in the editorial process, they need to cut to the other actor in the scene. Very often, your best work ends up on the cutting room floor, because it just doesn't work with the overall narrative drive of the story.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.

Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill.

The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.

Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.

In 'Serena,' stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer's rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it's a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.

The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

In 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the challenge was just transitions. Time transitions from 1961 to 1906; how do you follow a character in one environment to another? And sometimes these transitions were quick, so how do you do that?

At the beginning when you're writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it's 4 four hours long, you realise that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.

If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.

Well, I think it's important to have some kind of a narrative engine that pushes the audience through the landscape. But I love films like 'Apocalypse Now,' which is a very mood driven film. It's a magnetic force that's pulling them through.

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

The script - and a good one - tells you everything that you need to know.