Boris Kodjoe Quotes

TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.

Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.

I think a good story, well told is a good story, well told, whether you're watching the episodes all in a row or not. However, it might be fun to take a closer look at how the previous episode ends and how that end relates to the beginning of the next episode.

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

I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.

I think, often times, it's the audience that suffers when a show isn't given the opportunity to have a beginning, middle and end.

Sure. Some of the reviews have been very flattering, but the series is not finished yet. The end needs to be as strong as the beginning.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

I think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.

You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.

The other main difference between film and television is that you have the opportunity to flush out a character, over a longer period of time. Whereas with a film, you're confined to two or three hours, or whatever it may be.

I believe shooting chronologically gives you a very fresh perspective and you're always aware of where you are in the development of the characters.

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

The longer you work in this business [movie], the more you start to be able to see the carpentry. You can see where things are going, and it's harder to surprise you, as a reader

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long.

We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored" "I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.