Colm McCarthy Quotes

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

When you're making a television show, it's about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

The reason most novelists are not good screenwriters is that you don't have time for a lot of details. Novelists can really create a richer experience for the reader and have many subplots. You only have 90 pages because each page is a minute of screentime. You have to have certain things happen by certain pages, a certain story arc in the movie.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

As the director of a film, as the story teller, you have to keep your voice alive.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

Filmmaking, whatever the window dressing or the scale of a film may be, is eventually about telling a story.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

Because there is actually something very interesting in Goodfellas, how the style of the film changes as time goes by and based on the mental state of the protagonist.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

In order to have a TV series, you have to have a good idea for the story.

I look at the stories that Spike Lee tells... Great stories. Great director, great storyteller.

Writing for television is completely different from movie scriptwriting. A movie is all about the director's vision, but television is a writer's medium.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.