Long-Form Storytelling Quotes

In film and theater, you know the story and the journey from beginning to end, but with TV, you can keep peeling away layers and exploring a new world each week.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

Well, I don't know anything about television. I'd never done it before. Initially, it was quite daunting to take on so much challenge and so much time with it. I think it is a great outlet for an actress because you really have 13 hours to bring a character to life, which is so much more than with film, and you have the luxury of time to tell a story and to really color a character.

For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.

You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

Working on 'Dexter' is like shooting one big movie every year.

I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.

I want to do more independent film. I'm blessed to be working on really quality episodic television, which to me actually feels like a sort of 13-hour film.

Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long...which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.

There's nothing I've ever worked on that beat 'Game of Thrones' - that's a 10-hour movie; they put a lot of money in it.

The best writers are gravitating to that world. What's rewarding also is this: you have a two hour movie, you can't really delve into character that much. In a TV show you can. You can delve into character. You can get into nitty gritty.

I'm such a huge fan of television and what's happening in television, right now. You are able to visit characters and visit a story, week to week, push things in a different way than you can in a film, and you are able to go deeper, simply because you have more time. I'm just excited to do that. It's always good to do new things.

It almost feels like a movie or a- I know it's been said many times - that cable television is the new novel kind of thing - but it does feel like that.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

If you think about TV series, we make 16 one-hour movies a season. You don't get any opportunity like that in movies. I mean, I can't say I'll be able to do 16 movies in the next year, and so that's how I see it.

The idea of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula, all I could think of was, why haven't they done this with him before? It's such a genius idea. 'Dracula' has always been done as film, so it's been an hour and 40 minutes. What we're done is 10 hours of 'Dracula,' so you have a lot of freedom with all the different mythologies and nuances.

In Tamil, three-hour films are normal.

Honestly, one-hour drama is the hardest format there is. I think it's harder than movies, and it's harder than half-hour comedy.

There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.

When I approached Volume 1 of 'Lucid,' I realized I could tell something that only exists in four issues, or I could roll the dice a bit and approach this as Season 1 of a TV show.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.