Darren Star Quotes

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

When I teach sketch writing, there's still a beginning, middle and end.

In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.

I'm used to something where you have to create an entire world, and I do like that process. I like getting the audience to believe that outside of the frame of your television set, there's a whole real world that exists that is different from your day-to-day reality.

It's almost like the psychology of a film is no different from the psychology of a person in that it has to function, it has to breathe, it has to have its releases, it has anxiety.

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.

Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.

The one thing we pride ourselves on the most with writing 'Car Share' is that it's hard to predict what's going to happen and that's hard to achieve, especially with comedy.

It's why we're actors: to be able to tell the stories that really matter.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.

In the digital space, writers and directors get time to build and establish a character.

As a writer, every time I create a character, I try to go for something to captivate the audience in some way. It's also an extension of how the audience would like to see themselves.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

It's always useful to know that people are emotionally invested in a series because it means that you can take them down a certain road, and they should be interested.

I'd love to write more observational comedy but the stuff people seem to respond to is the most personal so it's snowballed from there.

What drives me is character driven material.

I'm a huge fan of writing for people rather than writing and then trying to wedge people in. I'd love to know who the people are before I can write for them. For me, it's a much more organic way to create characters.

I do just as much world-building in a short story as I do for a novel.

I watch 'Watchmen', and I wish I was in that writers room, so I could figure out what they're doing, story-breaking-wise. I've never seen a television show like that.