John Ridley Quotes

With animation, because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want, the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules.

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

Graphic novels let you take risks that just wouldn't fly in the conventional book form.

When I do 'Sweet Tooth,' really, whatever I want to do with the characters kind of goes. I'm sort of in charge.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

There's a creative freedom to comics, and a fulfillment I get out of panel layouts and storytelling that is hard for me to get anywhere else.

The thing that I enjoy about animation is the fact that it is unbridled, and there are no boundaries; when you are in the room, you don't have to focus on your clothing, make-up, hair, your choreography or your blocking; you really do have total freedom.

There's no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.

Those are fun, especially if they're going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they're not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative.

I was just blown away by everything my dad was doing, every play. It was amazing to be able to go as a young person to the theater and see these visuals and how creative it could be. More than anything it was realizing you could do that as a life path.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.

The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.

Subject matter that is not bound to reality offers more opportunity to write a unique story and cinematically present it in very unique ways.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

One of the wonderful things that I've always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios.

You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.

I don't think most of our films should be realistic, but you want that as an artistic possibility. Then, the artist can take the realism of the world and push it in ways that we can connect with.

In film, if you've got to do a scene in a swimming pool, you do a scene in a swimming pool. If you've got to blow up a car, you blow up a car. In theater, you can't do that, and therefore, you have the opportunity to engage the audience's imagination in a way that's rich.

You can be imaginative, you have the technology to convert your vision, you have the freedom to write the kind of stories you want to tell beyond the set formulas. Also, you have varied platforms to tell different kinds of stories.

I've seen situations where I think comics are really unrealistic about what creative expression and what the artistic freedom, what that entails.

The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.

In front of the camera and in front of the lens, there's no lawsuits, there's no agent, and there's most frequently no time limits... There's a longevity that's kind of built into it. I spend most of my time behind the scenes, and when it is time to perform, I'm genuinely delighted to do it.