Storytelling Choices Quotes

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.

What you cut out becomes part of the story you tell.

If you're going to write thrillers, you have to make a decision if you are going to be realistic or go off and over.

I'm a director. My job is to think how I want to present it. If I want to say [lines] eight times or 10 times, a hundred, it's my choice. I have a certain vision. If you don't have the vision, you don't have the story, you can't be interviewed.

The 'Saw' sequels went in a direction I wouldn't have gone in. With 'Insidious 2,' I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in.

Well, we knew that we wanted to tell a story that made bold choices, and one of those bold choices was meeting a storm trooper and seeing who this person was. That's something that had never been done.

Fans are always talking about endgame as though endgame has been chosen from minute 1. I don't know that you could talk to a single series creator that would say confidently 'Where I started is where I finished, and there was no way in hell I was going to stray from that path.' 'Dawson's' being the perfect example.

I've noticed that when people make vampire movies, they're always determining which of the rules they're going to stick to and which they'll abandon.

We got offers to make sequels to both 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' and they never really interested us because we like having these endings where it seems very final but could hint at some kind of future adventure that you'll never see.

Something about writing needs a sort of distance not to be involved as a writer - just something that makes it easier to write. You have to make choices all the time - what to tell and what not to tell.

It's very, very tempting to make a superhero film or show and make it about the powers.

Fanboys are a creator's blessing and curse. If a fanboy likes you, they love you. Obsessively. If you cross them with some plot point or story direction they reject, expect to be wholly and continually eviscerated across the Internet.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

And that's why I chose on purpose not to have a death scene. We've seen them in a million movies and it's too much like cranking the tears out. I didn't want that scene.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?

Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.

Making comic adaptations means making a lot of choices - you need to adjust the pacing, the dialogue, and in this case, a lot of the cultural references.

I think you have to pick and choose what is most important to tell the story.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.