J. H. Wyman Quotes

Creatively, I try to always look forward and look at the next thing I want to do.

I'm all about working with directors that are doing different techniques and I think everyone has their way of getting it to the place that they think is best.

If I have an idea I want to put in a movie, I know what camera will make that look best, and I have ideas for future projects and stuff I'd like to build for those. I think it's just part of how I work, though.

I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.

I think I'm really drawn to filmmakers and artists who are kind of pathologically incapable of thinking straightforward about film, and about life as well, who cannot help but think laterally, think sideways about an approach to anything cinematic.

You create a little world when you are making a film and you have to feel that you would want to be a part of that world. I sometimes look at the scripts I get and think 'what are they thinking?'

There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.

When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

I try to have an open ear, but at the end, it would never change direction to where I think I should go. Because if I listened to everybody else, they're thinking about what's right now or what was the last thing - they're not thinking about what's next.

I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.

The movie is in my head and that's the movie. But I'd be crazy to not be flexible. I think because I have the movie in my head, I can be flexible. I know what's going to work and not work and I know, generally, what I can change and bend and have the movie still work.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.

I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw," which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors. All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?" They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.

I explained to Amazon that I don't like outlining or projecting what something's going to be. I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes. I was really resistant to do the mini-bible. So I gave them something, but I really didn't want to do it that way.

I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too. Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

I think best with a pencil in my hand.