Medium Constraints Quotes

I always have a rule that acting is acting and truth is truth and you just go out there and you do it. But what happens in each medium is that you have other responsibilities. The acting remains the same, but each medium dictates assuming other halves to make the acting work.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

Sometimes there's a disjoint between what works on the page and what works with visual story telling.

I try to always go for something... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.

TV is just such a fast-moving medium that you do what you can do, and what you can't do, you don't worry about too much.

Being a professional screenwriter is perhaps the hardest occupation. Because nothing is ever yours and, by the nature of the medium, you are never ultimately responsible for your work. It can be interesting - if you have another outlet.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

When you're just writing, you can do anything with it. But with TV, you've gotta work within certain budget constraints, so you've got to pick and choose your battles.

Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.

You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.

If you're reading a comic strip, you can read it at any speed you want. But with film and music, the audience has to take it the way the composer gives it.

It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this.

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

The comic world has its own limitations, as everything does. I adore it, I respect it, but it's not going to take over all of me.