James Watkins Quotes

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.

Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.

I don't really make movies with an intention other than asking myself, 'Do I love the character, and do I love the story?'

I'm always so inspired by Jeff Eastin's writing.

In those early days, the important thing was the happy ending. I did not tolerate unhappy endings - for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like 'Wuthering Heights,' and very, very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed.

It's the same assignment on every part: you want to create a real world, and the tone of it is a little different on each movie. You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

In a film we have limited time and space to say what we have to, hence the visual language and brevity needs to be paramount. In a novel, however, we can dissect each thought and emotion and build on it.

As I've grown as a creator, I feel that I want to tread in deeper waters and have a lot more going on emotionally with the characters. That's my appreciation for comics as a creator and a consumer as well. I'm more into stories that don't just bounce off the surface but go a little bit deeper.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.

Some of our best writers are self taught. Screenwriting is a combo of craft and art. The craft part can be taught, about how to be visual and economical with scenes. However, finally it's the individuality of the writer that will come into play.

We can't put up a movie that looks beautiful but doesn't have substance.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

You first and foremost need to be honest with the script because you don't want to do anything to screw up the basic fundamentals of the story. You don't want to create anything overly dramatic when you don't need to, and you don't want to create anything less dramatic than necessary, either.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

That's the thing about TV: it gives you so much time to tell your story; it's comparable to comics.

I suppose I do have an interest in stories that show complexity.

I prefer film. I think it moves slower, it gives you a chance to kind of get a feel for things. Sometimes TV moves so fast that you don't even remember what you've done.