Roger Spottiswoode Quotes

Everything in a story should be credible.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

Overall, I adhere to the one guiding rule any author writing historical fiction should follow: whatever you describe has to be possible. It may not be common, obvious, or even all that probable, but it absolutely has to be possible.

It's a good question, because to be believable is the only way that you could be successful.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable.

Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

I don't want to play myself up as a hero, because it would make me unbelievable. I'd rather settle for people thinking that I'm a bum, but digging my stories, than liking me and not being able to believe in my stories. That's one reason I've been hard on myself, because I want my stuff to be believable.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

The highest praise is when a kid says, 'This book feels so real; this could have happened at my school.'

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

For me, the comedies that truly work are the ones that are grounded in some way. If it's all heightened, it's really hard. It's a little slippery. It's hard to get purchase on the side of the wall.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

I don't like something so fantasy-filled that I couldn't imagine it ever happening. I like things that could come true. That's how I conduct the show.

With all comedy, you try to ground it in credibility and reality.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

I like everything to be natural... believable.