Narrative Adaptation Quotes

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable.

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

I'm a storyteller - that's my chamber, that's my box. I'm always tryin' to give you the best story from our side of the table that you could really relate to quick. I understand where I wanna be at, but sometimes the production takes me where I need to go.

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.

Music is a big part of the director's life; Ms. Coppola's previous feature, a screen adaptation of 'The Virgin Suicides,' was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative.

What happens often is the script is written and once the director comes on board you have lots of conversations and it mutates again.

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our characters had not been through; the whole trajectory of the world had changed. Yet our show took place in a parallel universe. I wasn't really sure what to do about this. In no one's wildest dreams did it occur that an event like this could possibly happen.

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.

A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don't know where a character is going to go and what's going to happen to them until you've seen the actor take that part and make it their own.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.

We're at a point nowhere it has to change. We have characters that are not alive that are alive in the book. We have characters that never appeared in the book. We have a lot of events that didn't quite happen the same way in the book. But there's so much in the book, stuff we've passed in the timeline that I really thought was awesome, that I really wanted to get to.

Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

Some stories seem to lend themselves to telling right away. 'All The President's Men' was done, what, four or five years after the event? It certainly seemed to work there, as opposed to something that happened 40 years ago.

Now people don't know what it was in the Paris version, they put the skeleton at the end, not at the beginning. At least they've learn something!

Fans are always talking about endgame as though endgame has been chosen from minute 1. I don't know that you could talk to a single series creator that would say confidently 'Where I started is where I finished, and there was no way in hell I was going to stray from that path.' 'Dawson's' being the perfect example.

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

In the years that I have been an actress, I have told the story of my life many times, and I get tired of it, so sometimes I change it a little. That is, I change the mood. If I am feeling sad, then I remember to tell only the sad things. If I am feeling happy, then I can remember only to tell all the good things.

The technology can change, but storytelling remains the same. It's just a digital world now instead of an analog world, but now the storytelling's the same. You got different tools. That's all.

Because videogames are so inherently influenced by movies, to take a movie and literally create a videogame out of it, you're immediately setting limitations and expectations on what that game can be.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.