Karthik Subbaraj Quotes

The difficulty with film is you always have to consign a story to being a certain length, whereas with a book you don't have budget constraints; you can cast it yourself.

Ron Howard is a great filmmaker and also a great storyteller in 60- and 30-minute shows, so why isn't he going to be a great storyteller in 10-minute pieces?

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

Suddenly, after years of television being the poor relation and film being everything, it now feels like film is a conjuring trick. It's like, "Oh, my god, how are you going to do that in 90 minutes, as opposed to eight hours?! I've got so little time to do this!" It becomes an art form, in itself. Doing both helps you do each one.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.

I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.

Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length. I've put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences. Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters. Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind - above all the subconscious mind.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

I don't recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.

It wasn't until I started to do 'Poison River' that the readership started falling. 'Poison River' started out very slowly and simply, but then it got really dense and complicated. I don't know, I think the readers just got fed up or burned out. They started dropping off.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

I had just come off doing a lot of commercials when I did 'Go,' so a part of the fast pace and efficiency comes from the discipline I had to learn from telling stories in 25-second increments, and that type of discipline is insane.

Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so that the viewer does not become bewildered.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.