Story Credibility Quotes

Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.

If you keep the situations real, the characters' behavior will be real and honest, too. If they're suddenly robbing a bank and exchanging snappy dialogue, well, I wouldn't even know how to write that.

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.

I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.

I have always felt a comedy's story is undercut if you have a villain who is not really menacing.

As writers, we all have an agenda, but if you recognize that agenda in a book, then you've failed.

As a person who wants to see and believe in the story, I don't think women at age 50 are able to sing young girls.

When doing a fantasy show - or a show with fantasy elements - the more you can anchor an effect to reality, the stronger the illusion is.

But here's my point to the LA Times. If you had a serious story to run, if you thought there was serious misconduct, you don't wait until the Thursday before the Tuesday. You run it early.

For me, I guess I feel like the notion of 'feel good' entertainment... I'm all for it, but I just think you really, really, really have to earn it. I'm not sure I have a lot of movies in me where I see a world that earns it.

'Lost,' at its core, is a science-fiction show. Live music helps lend an air of legitimacy to this otherwise crazy storyline. It makes a big difference.

Make your characters believable, and your reader will believe what they believe.

I like some science in my science fiction.

That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.

I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

Making sure that the geography and timelines work is always the hardest part of writing. But you owe it to the readers to get it right!

You cannot put Paul Heyman with Roman Reigns. People would know you're putting Paul Heyman with him because there is a problem.

One of the rules that I always follow is that no matter how crazy characters may act, and no matter how absurd or strange their actions may be, that it's justified in the character's mind why they are doing it. Not to get all heady about it, but it's fun for me to test how far I can go with things while still keeping it grounded enough that you believe that the character really believes that what he's doing will get him what he wants. It's a personal challenge to me to see how far I can go with that.

And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap.