David Leitch Quotes

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

But he did say that the character would be on the sidelines in movies One and Two, and move into the middle with number Three, but I didn't realize he would move in with quite such a bang.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

'The Wire' is similar to 'The Walking Dead' in so far as everybody pulling for everybody else to get to the turning point of the story.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he's also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you're just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the 'Lucifer' veneer got less and less.

To me, action has to come from the plot.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.