Sydney Pollack Quotes

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

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.

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.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

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

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

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

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

I'm really calculating when it comes to these scripts - I'm really calculated about character behavior and dialogue.

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.

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.

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.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

I never really approach any project or story thinking of themes first or what a certain character 'represents.' Maybe other writers do, but for me, it just starts with the characters and a certain emotion I want to convey. It usually isn't until I get deeper into a book and look back a bit that I start to see the themes, etc.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

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.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work.