Joshua Jackson Quotes

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

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 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.

Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.

I feel like with a movie you know your whole journey, and even though little minutiae might change, you're able to get a better idea of where you're going, whereas TV is engaging a different side of your brain.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

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

Television is a lot of fun. It's faster-paced. The schedule is really desirable, I guess. But as far as films go, and I've only done a couple; film is like a definitive beginning, middle and end. You know your character's arch.

In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

Film and television are just different. Film is cool because it's a complete package. You know the beginning, middle, and end. You can plan it out more, which I like. But with television you get a new script every week, so it's constantly a mystery as to what you're going to be doing.

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.

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.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.

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.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

That's the thing about TV: it gives you so much time to tell your story; it's comparable to comics.

Every story has its demands.