story presentation Quotes

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.

If I were to take five comic books, from four different publishers and Marvel, and lay them out, even if you didn't know the characters, you would be able to take a look at that Marvel comic and go, 'That's Marvel.' There's something unique about the way the story is presented.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

A good story needs only a good storyteller.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

The big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what’s the right way to tell a particular story.

I always like to have faith that an audience will suspend their disbelief, if you present it to them in the right way. I find it peculiar when people scoff at one bold idea, and yet they'll then turn over and watch a man travel through time in a police phone box. I think it's just how you present the idea.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

Television has a real problem. They have no page two. Consequently every big story gets the same play and comes across to the viewer as a really big, scary one.

Forgotten was presented to me by the drama department at LWT as a concept and I found it immediately intriguing and very powerful. I was completely led by the power of the piece and its dramatic potential.

I keep trying to train myself to stop saying 'filmmaker' and start saying 'storyteller.' We're telling stories.

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

Audience come with expectations, and our job is to engage them for two hours. We take efforts to make the story more interesting and also present it in such a way that it is liked by all the audience.

I worked at NBC and MTV for two years, and it was very interesting to see the comparisons of audiences and the way that I would have to present a story to the two different places.

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

It's fun to present stories that have a character that, really, everybody wants to be.

A story without context is like a diamond without a mounting. The stone may be beautiful lying loose on a table, but when it is carefully mounted in the right setting it can dazzle you with its brilliance and sparkling beauty.