narrative strength Quotes

It's not the side of the bigger army that wins. It's the country that tells a better story.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

If in making a picture you introduce two ideas, you weaken it by half-if three, it weakens by compound ratio-if four, the picture will be really too weak to consider at all and the human interest would be entirely lost.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.

Usually, when special effects get in the way, it's because the story isn't strong enough. If you don't start with a strong screenplay, it's easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it's going to carry you. But it never works. It's just tiresome.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The secret to 'Year One' is that it's a Jim Gordon story. It's a great Bruce Wayne story, don't get me wrong, but Jim Gordon is the focus of that book. To me, that's the stronger emotional arc. It's not that the Bruce Wayne stuff isn't masterful, because it is, but it's Jim's book.

Forecasting is simply not a strength of the species; we are much better with tools and narrative storytelling.

You can only see 'Star Wars' for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it's a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.

A film only works when its content works. The visuals can be breathtaking, but if the content is not good, it won't work.

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.

The script is the most important thing for me. I'm advised that other things are important too, and they are. The director that you'll be working with is hugely important, and the cast that are with you is really important as well. But, for me, the thing that gets my heart excited and really makes me invested in something or not is just the quality of the script.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.