Formulaic Storytelling Quotes

Bond in 'Goldeneye' is pretty much a set character. To be honest, he's another version of Connery, and Connery was terrific. How many submarines can you blow up? How many control rooms are evaporating?

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

I think it's a bit like saying a painter does a painting everyone loves and it's 40% blue paint, so from now on you have to paint paintings that are 40% blue. That's the film industry at its most blunt, which is why it's constantly bats and spiders and superheroes.

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

The problem with romantic comedies is you know the ending by the poster. So they're not movies you can keep doing over and over again expect satisfaction somehow.

I think a challenge with every sitcom is, how do you maintain things that people are attached to without becoming so reiterative that it just feels like you're sort of watching a reenactment of previous episodes?

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.

I think, very often, we're addicted to procedurals, those good guy/bad guy shows, and the 'problem' with procedurals is they all follow the same formula: The bad guy does his thing, the good guy goes after him, and in most cases, the good guy figures out who did it and catches him.

I'm not gonna rush out and see the next 'Batman;' I'm not big on formula movies.

As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there's no rigour to it.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.

There are writers out there who say they're writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette.

Hollywood movies are run on fear and they don't want to make bold choices. They, generally, speaking want to keep things status quo. That's not really interesting for me.

So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it.

There have been so many 'James Bond' movies, 'Spiderman' films, 'Mission Impossible' series, etc. Is there any difference in the basic story? Yet, each time there's a release, people are excited.

If the entire script feels formulaic, then you know that the film will be like that. But if it's a really interesting script, and the character happens to be formulaic, then maybe there's a way of making them more interesting.

I'm not even against superheroes. It's not my cup of tea. But there's just this endless stream of them and they are so repetitious and suspend certain rules in a way that I don't find dramatically helpful. The imperviousness can be too much.

I think that there's a sense that procedurals, because they have more of a formula to the storytelling, it doesn't necessarily rate as high as some of the high-concept, big-idea, big-swing things that get the critics really excited.

I was under the impression that if you've read one vampire series for young adults, you've read them all.

What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it's a dead body - you're just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, 'Oh, that's his pitch for a TV show. That's his pitch for a movie. That's him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.' I didn't do that.

Romantic comedy has come to mean a couple of moderately talented actors placed in implausible situations obliged to go through a set of paces that are all too familiar, the end result being neither romantic nor comedic.

I've been offered a lot of police series, but I'm very good at staying away from them. They're usually based on such a boring formula.

In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.