Cinematic Structure Quotes

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

As a viewer, that's work I respond to - work that I know is singular in some way. If I'm being challenged by something on screen, if I don't quite know why it's happening, I want to know I can do the work of pulling it apart and that there'll be something satisfactory about it. If the architecture is sound, you can be lyrical in execution.

Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?

Actors should never be important. Only directors should have power and place.

I like films that are well-written and concise and with not a lot of room for improvisation.

When you cut a film, certain scenes fall away and don't fit into the shape of the movie.

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.

We live lives that aren't broken into neat three-act structures. On any given day anything can happen, from the hilarious to tragic. So why can't my movies be like that?