Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.
Hollywood's not a progressive place. Everyone likes to think that Hollywood is hip, but it's not hip at all.
Am I overjoyed when somebody says, 'Oh, we're going to do another Jane Austen?' No - because there's never anything in it for me.
It is tedious to tell again tales already plainly told.
Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
Nowadays filmmakers tend to recycle the same cliches over and over again.
I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.
I loved working on 'Thomas & Friends.' That's an iconic show, and that thing is, like, a billion-dollar property. But content-wise, yep, if you're not into steam trains and preschool storytelling, it can get a little wearing after years of it.
When you do a lot of interviews, you find yourself telling the same stories over and over. After you do it for a whole day, you say, 'Christ, I've said this five times today.' It gets fun when you get so bored you start making it all up.
Sadly, for those who are busy sawing off their feet to escape the trap of cliches, every story is chock full of them and sometimes depends on an especially hoary one.
Hollywood's old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies.
Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.
So often, I think shows get into these grooves where they know the characters hit, and they just write for it over and over and over again.
A lot of big studio films, which are fun and great, tend to have a formula, and you've seen it before, and it's a new version of it.
Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.
So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different
I think Hollywood is in love with sequels. If it's successful once, just jazz it up and shoot it out there again. I think it's unfortunate.
I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms.
That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.
Animation has been ghettoized through the years by giving the impression we only do the same kind of stories.
There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!
I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.
With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.
