Scene Structure Quotes

Everything we do on 'Luck' is absolutely no different than if we'd had been doing it in a feature film. There's no short cuts. The specificity of what every single line might mean. Everything Dustin Hoffman does. Kevin Dunn is as authentic in the last scene of the last episode as he is in the first scene of the first episode.

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.

I can work a lot faster when I'm writing a screenplay than when I'm writing a play because, if I'm having a problem with a scene or something, I can just be writing it in a way where there's no dialogue, or find a way to make sound do the work that I want to do or a close-up do the work that I need to do.

I like it when actors get an opportunity to chew into something. They love scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends - scenes that give an arc to their characters and allow audiences to get to know these people.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.

I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.

Growing up, I wanted to write films and make films. Even as I took this detour and stayed in the music world, I still think in terms of 'What is in this room? What is the shot? Who are the characters? What is the conversation here?' My sense of pacing is very filmlike, it's not musical.

As much as I love creating entertaining visuals, I love toying with the pace of a movie and trying to perfect that. It's imperative to the impact: faster cuts, cuts at the right moments that meld with the tenor of a scene. Creating and maintaining that feeling.

My first student film was Orientation, which was basically the set-up for Animal House. There are a couple of scenes that we later borrowed in some form.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.

When you're writing for a movie, you're trying to capture the emotion of a scene. I find it a fascinating process.

The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.

I worked on a show called 'West Wing' before. I didn't work with Aaron Sorkin, but he created the show and set the tenor of the show, which was you follow the words of the script perfectly because there's a dramaturgical thing behind it.

When you're a film-maker, sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity.

As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

When you are working on a script, the story itself is not difficult. You say this would happen and then this, resulting perhaps in this. And the dialogue you make as true as you can.

Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft.

I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can't use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what's in the scene.

I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' because it's got to be my eye.

I have always meticulously storyboarded my films from beginning to end.