narrative limitations Quotes

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.

A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain.

I really like the "two is better than three" line. People ask me is this drama or comedy? I just think the more colors you have to a film the better. The more genres, the more people will like it. I like relating to the whole general speaking public. The script itself is 99 pages but the novel it is based on is 600. I had to leave a lot of stuff out of the script. I had a limitation of what I could present on the big screen.

There is a lot of pretty horrific stuff that happens, and I don't usually get those kinds of characters who get to go to those places.

The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.

You want to go to a place where you work every day, where you get to tell stories that look and feel like the audience in America that are watching. You're really limited, if you walk into a room and you can just tell stories about that. So, we've been really blessed.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

We tell each other stories so we can understand the world better and there's catharsis and we understand the models of what a hero could be and what the hero's journey as a human being is all about. But unfortunately, I think sometimes those stories too can be very prohibitive and confining.

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.

Using a dog as a narrator has limitations and it has advantages. The limitations are that a dog cannot speak. A dog has no thumbs. A dog can't communicate his thoughts except with gestures.

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.

Suddenly, after years of television being the poor relation and film being everything, it now feels like film is a conjuring trick. It's like, "Oh, my god, how are you going to do that in 90 minutes, as opposed to eight hours?! I've got so little time to do this!" It becomes an art form, in itself. Doing both helps you do each one.

When it's one animal, you really do have a tougher time because you've gotta commit to story structures that maybe are difficult to find the range in the animal to tell those stories. There are only so many things they do, if they're living in the natural world, that we can appreciate. There are plenty of things that they do that we don't appreciate.