In the evolution of the [The Hunger Games] movie, Gary [Ross] and I talked a lot about tonal bandwidth and making sure that the look and feel and style and choices of the movie stayed within a certain consistent bandwidth.
We built 'Jade Empire,' then we built 'Mass Effect,' then we built 'Dragon Age.' With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore, or you drown!
If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
I think all great comedies - or at least the comedies I like - it has some of the funniest moments, but it never breaks the spell for the audience. It never pushes the audience away by spoofing itself too much or undermining the characters or making them cardboard or flimsy. Everybody is really trying to do what their characters believe in - and so nobody breaks the spell of the world, even though in other ways it's a comedy and very funny.
His [Jesus'] historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.
The thing I do miss about the way some sequels were in the past was that each film felt like its own unique, complete tone. Now, sequels are tonal facsimiles of the ones before them, like a television series, whereas back in the past sequels would often be radically different from the ones before.
I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.
The requirements for illustrating an eight-page story are as different from that of an ensemble-cast mini-series as they are different from a solo ongoing. Whether or not they're named Captain America or Ruby Thursday matters less to me than whether or not their characterization is consistent and actions logical... storytelling concerns.
I prefer working out of strict continuity, because no normal human being can have a firm grip on the constantly shifting bardo-like territory of a comics universe, where entire histories can be erased by a strong enough super-sneeze.
'Bionic Woman' changed direction too much from episode to episode, which I think is why it lost momentum.
For me, some of the most intense creativity comes when something has to change for technical or design reasons, and you're trying to find a way to make it fit the fiction.
Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.
Make them do as you want them to," she said. "I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.
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.
That was the challenge. How can you tell the story here and make sure it goes the same way on the other side of the world?
Suspension of disbelief is a necessary ingredient in all storytelling. So it has been with the government's narrative that it is delivering Brexit.
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?
The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.
There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts.
I don't know if it was written off in that single line in Thor. It was given another way of looking at it. There are a couple of lines in Thor basically saying that science and magic it gets to a point where what's the difference. And I think we're continuing that.
We shouldn't be chasing other movies, but stay true to the tone of Man of Steel.
I'm not a big fan of introducing a bunch of new mysteries into a story without really knowing where they're going because you just end up struggling at the end to make sense of them and make it all seem like you planned it all along.
But whatever the POV, and the difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame, stay within it.
