Ken Burns Quotes

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

The film is made in the editing room.

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.

I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

With any movie at all the challenge lies in the storytelling.

I love to tell stories, but the making is less comfortable. I like to be private, and being in the middle of a film crew with the least amount of privacy is the discomfort of shooting a movie. For me, the editing is the great moment when I can bring back ideas and realize the movie for the last time before I hand it to the audience.

When I choose the scripts, all I look forward to is an impressive narration.

I've written tons of scripts, and when I wrote 'The New Girl in Town,' I read it to my parents, and they suggested I make a movie out of it. I got a few friends together, and I shot the movie in one weekend, and then my mom and I edited it.

The combo of a great story and good director works for me.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

Eventually, the outcome of a film is not in my hands. What I do while making the film is in my hands, and that is what translates onto the screen.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.

I have been in advertising and I know my craft well, but ultimately in cinema every scene has to matter, and that has to do with the writing.

You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.

To make anything successful, you need a good writer.

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

My forte is editing and I am most experienced in that. I love the challenge of playing with material and imagination while editing.

If you have five weeks to write an episode of television or seven months to write a movie or several years to write a book, each of those things is going to be better than a live television show.

If I can be dead honest with you, when I first see the script for a new episode of 'Endeavour,' if anything jars, I say, 'What's this? Has it got a place in our story?' And if it hasn't, it has to go.

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.