Paul Morrissey Quotes

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.

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 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 like films to be complete in their written form.

'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.

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.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

I'm just a sucker for a good script.

If you have to be the antagonist, you often have a lot more creative powers. You have a lot more color to you.

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

The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.

I think plays have nothing to do with one's own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret - that's what drama is about!

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

I think conflicted characters are always more interesting.

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

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

Write dialogue that supports the situation and the characters, as you find them.

I think that I'm going to write a bigger thing, and then I end up writing about people, and the bigger thing recedes into the background, and hope that it's still there.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

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.

Endings don't have anything to do with what your movie is about. Now, there is an emotional climax, there's an emotional resolution that is 100 percent important. If I get that wrong, get your money back.

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.