Chris Meledandri Quotes

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I really enjoy working in genre series, because you really have to create the characters.

I like to take a character and develop it.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

You don't put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it's always underneath.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

Normally my films have a single thread of an emotion, an insight or one single belief, and then I turn the entire story and build it around that.

Whenever I write for television, I plan the story on whiteboard wallpaper in my office, using a system created by the American writer Dan Harmon. It's remarkably simple: a character wants something; they enter a new world and adapt to it; they get what they want, re-enter the old world and change.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.