Colin Jost Quotes

I don't have a drawer full of ideas. I kind of look around and take notes and wonder what could actually be a whole movie. And each time, I think I'm going to do it more commercial this time; I'm going to get a big budget and make it. But I always come up with some small idea.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

I think most Hollywood meetings are silly and I truly despise pitching. It's insane to expect someone to come in and tell you the story before they've written it, and buying an idea from someone who can explain it rather than write it is like choosing a mechanic based on his ability to draw a picture of your car's problem.

It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Most ideas remain inside you for a while. You tell somebody when there is a spark or a thought, and leave it at that. You come back later, write down a few lines. I makes note in my mind on whether it can be made into a film or not.

I am constantly thinking of different ideas and formats for TV shows. I am in a place where anything is possible if you want to do it.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

The way Pixar has always worked is that we think of an idea and then we make it. We don't develop lots of ideas and then pick one.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.

I wrote 'All is Lost' while editing 'Margin Call'. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I think very abstractly when I'm writing. Then, as the project moves on, it becomes more like sculpting.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

Well, you can't improvise story, which is a fact. If you could, the budget would be insane.

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.