Josh Widdicombe Quotes

A standard sitcom... is a very standard idea, like these people falling in love and living with each other, and all these people living with each other. It's like, okay, we hooked them up in episode 15, how do we bust that, how do we find a new kernel in it?

It's an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel - it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.

Usually, in romantic comedies, you end up sacrificing a great deal of the complexity - you know, just two attractive people and a good soundtrack.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

'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.

What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.

I'm in the mood for another Moonstruck experience, for another romantic comedy.

Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

It's always good to have a story arch.

There are so many romantic comedies made, but very few dramas or love stories. And with a love story, you have to take time to develop three-dimensional characters.

The movies that I love and model after, like 'Annie Hall,' 'When Harry Met Sally,' and in particular for me, 'Broadcast News,' are the tone of life, which isn't a setup punch-line every two minutes.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

You know, I grew up on romantic comedies, and it's hard to find a new way to tell that story.

'Friends With Benefits': it feels like a two-hander to me, but it is a big movie, and this is the first straightforward male I've been able to play. I would describe my character in 'The Social Network' as a kind of sociopath. I would describe my character in 'Bad Teacher' as... just a weirdo. But this is a male's male.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.

As writers, we must keep throwing problems at our characters. Conflict is the heart of good storytelling. Hiking in nature along a twisting trail can remind us what a good story feels like. It's the opposite of a treadmill - or an interstate highway.

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.

I'd like to do a romantic comedy.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

I think the best romantic comedies don't have villains.

For me, it's nice to have a character who can never find love and have that be the running theme, but I think when you open the door to a story line about relationships, you open the door to another realm of comedy.