Scene Construction Quotes

My background is on the stage, so when I'd write movies, they'd be a lot like plays.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

Typically, whenever you're envisioning how you're going to shoot something, you have a location or a set that you're going to build, and it's going to be built to specifications.

I am a creative person and watching a movie is like writing a story. So when I see a movie, I also see the editing, the music, the camera angles, etc.

I've written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them. They're judged by set criteria that I know.

I learned how to write TV by writing 'Grey's Anatomy.'

I was trained as a straight dramatist.

I am eternally impressed and amazed by what directors do.

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

I think one of the major things a director has to do is to know his subject matter, the subject matter of his script, know the truth and the reality of it. That's very important.

Mohan Raja is an interesting filmmaker. He is constantly, if I may use the word, contradicting himself. He explains a scene, and then he will try to break that and rebuild it. That, to me, is filmmaking. Every scene is constructed after a lot of discussions.

Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.

When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

When I write a screenplay - and I think it's one of the reasons why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter - I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page; I'm thinking in terms of visual images - basically, a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.

Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

I think it makes such a huge difference when the director has acting experience as well because it just means that he not only has a view of the film as a whole and the intentions of the scene in terms of the audience, he also has an actor's instinct of how to communicate something to us.

I love the work, I love being in front of the camera and working with actors and directors and creating something. For me, it's like learning everyday.

What a director should be doing is making it appear as though there was no script.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

When you're just an actor, you do your role, and then you're in your trailer. It's not as hands on as when you're directing. You live and breathe it.