Kelly Sue DeConnick Quotes

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

I'm not really interested in doing a traditional romantic comedy where everything ties up neatly.

One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

We tried to approach this as though there's never been a Superman movie before, but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology. There are the pillars that you have to respect, and I'm not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.

Well, I think if you're telling a story, a three act structure will just naturally emerge out of it. But I also love it when a film doesn't feel like it's anchored too rigidly to that structure and you feel like anything could happen.

I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.

There are all kinds of values within the films but I don't make message films.

I don't want to tell them what to take away from a movie, I think a movie should tell that.

I don't ignore continuity, and try my best to stick as closely to the current status quo as possible, but it's not my primary concern when I start a story.

If something depressing is happening, that's gold. That's the best possible situation you could be in. But if that doesn't happen, you just have to make up stuff - it's more fun because you have more freedom with what you can write about. You can invent characters and situations. It's actually easier.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions.

To me, there are lots of different stories to tell and you usually find the best way to tell the one you are telling once you are in it.

When we started talking to our actors and to our directors, this is with all due respect to the film, if you want to know what we're not doing, go watch the movie. If you want to know what we're doing, it's very much steeped in the world of the comics, but it also has a life of its own and that's really what television and our films really do is that we take the best....We hope and we're very confident that this is the beginning of something that's very exciting on Netflix.

Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.