Lisa Joy Quotes

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.

The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

I love being creative. I love acting, but I also love directing because you get to have a vision for the whole and bring that vision to fruition.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.

I can't separate the process of writing from the visual process. I'm speaking only for myself here, but I'm a highly visual writer. In my imagination, when I'm thinking of a scene, I think of every last detail of it: The space, the color palette, the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

Technique is of less interest than character and story.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

The kind of work I do and the films I believe in, I had to take charge of making that kind of cinema.

When you're writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you're going to do. You don't have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

I make hip-hop, but use Doom as a character to convey stories that a normal dude can't. You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn't mean the writer himself is crazy.

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

In my own work, when I start off writing a scene, I don't know which physical details are going to turn out to be meaningful. But, inevitably, certain images will stand out - you start to decide which ones are important as you go.

The good thing about directing a screenplay that you've written is that you see the film in your head as you're writing it and then you see those decisions through to the end.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

Live action movies are someone else's story. With animation, audiences can't think that. Their guards are down.