Billy Campbell Quotes

The best writers are gravitating to that world. What's rewarding also is this: you have a two hour movie, you can't really delve into character that much. In a TV show you can. You can delve into character. You can get into nitty gritty.

I'm such a huge fan of television and what's happening in television, right now. You are able to visit characters and visit a story, week to week, push things in a different way than you can in a film, and you are able to go deeper, simply because you have more time. I'm just excited to do that. It's always good to do new things.

I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we?

I'm pretty excited about the state of TV these days. There's great opportunity for really complicated relationships, in a way that I don't really see as much in movies anymore.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film... at least in Hollywood studio films.

It all comes down to what is best for those particular genres, and if you believe in the stories that you're telling and the characters that you like that you want to tell those stories with, you can pretty much apply it to any genre.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

I think television is really incredible because of the fact that you get to sit with a character for so, and the character does something different, every week. I think that's really interesting.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

We in Illumination Entertainment tend not to put ideas through a brand funnel. We've collected a group of people who share a certain taste, and that is connected to our aspirations for our brand. We pride ourselves on making character-centric movies. If I had to say what's the most important thing this company does, it's creating characters that stay with the audience long after they leave the theater.

I like doing sequels. Basically, I think it's a fun thing to follow characters in time. In real time.

My feeling has always been if you entertain people, they give you permission to do more on a thematic or character level.

You can always find ways to make it different, as long as it's a really well-written script and well-written character.

All you need to know about plotting is twofold. 1. Give your characters goals. 2. Don't let them reach those goals.

The other main difference between film and television is that you have the opportunity to flush out a character, over a longer period of time. Whereas with a film, you're confined to two or three hours, or whatever it may be.

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.

I think that comics and television, as mediums, go hand in hand. Both tell long-form, continuing stories that are parsed out into little chapters and, if are successful, continue for years and years. What that means to me, as a writer, is it tells stories of transformation and evolution as characters.