Lydia Leonard Quotes

I'm just attracted to good material and great characters and that can come in any form, whether it's television or film or a theatre piece.

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

The greatest gift that an actor can have is good scripts because then you're relieved of the responsibility of trying to elevate the material.

TV has gotten perhaps better than your average film script, but at the same time, it's fun to give it all you've got for a few months and produce a story.

I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.

If it's a drama or comedy, it doesn't matter to me. I just want to like the writing.

Great writing makes great television.

Television is so neat; I grew up doing theater, and I've done a bit of film. I know I'm stating the obvious, but it's a unique storytelling form in that it's able to constantly evolve.

A lot of scripts are written with an eye on what will be popular or what will titillate or what this actor can do well. I don't think those kinds of scripts ever work.

I think what makes a good action film is a story that gets you involved. Just action, by itself, is not going to work.

I don't usually watch a lot of TV, but 'Mad Men' changed my perspective. I admire Matthew Weiner who came up with the idea and wrote such a great TV series, and the broadcasting company for being bold enough to air such a series.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

The technology is really where all of the changes have taken place, but the fundamentals of a good story being the basis of every good picture, and really the only basis still remains the rule, more so today, I think, because we've unfortunately weaned an audience from birth to kind of mindless movies.

I really believe that the movie will never be as good as the book, both because the book goes on longer - a movie is basically an abridgment of a book - and because books are internal. But they are incredibly powerful. The visual format is, you know, amazing.

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

I think there's a lot of elements that go into making a really awesome horror film and that's like putting together like a real good group of people that you love to watch them either live or die.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

It's very difficult to find good scripts in Hollywood any more.