storytelling decisions Quotes

Films are all about decisions, and that's what I love.

The idea that a film is created in the editing room - it's only a certain kind of movie that's made in the editing room and it's not one that I really want to see.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

Some of my favorite scenes aren't in the movie. Because you, at some point, realize that your responsibility as director is purely to the story. It's not to your pleasure.

I think people imagine that I have about five scripts sitting in front of me and I say, 'I think I'm going to go with the super hero thing and after that I'll wrap it up with some more sci-fi and then do a romantic comedy.' But it doesn't quite work out that way.

I make different choices in regards to the stories I want to be a part of. In my mind, it's a totally different medium. Commercials are little skits, and movies are stories; I became a little more picky in my choices for stories that I wanted to be involved in.

It's always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with, writing for, and seeing on the screen.

In rare instances you have to give up what you thought was a great scene.

Literally, the piece at the end is where the universe is cracked apart, it's a big moment. Basically, they, the filmmakers, have directed the story earlier in the book. It happens, it's called adapting a book, you have to make decisions about things. It's not unusual having to cut out scenes.

The starting point and the ending point are nothing but two arbitrary choices. You make them as in soccer games, where they chose that it's 90 minutes, not less and not more. But the choices are the responsibility of the filmmaker. You have to choose to join the story at an arbitrary point, and you leave it at an arbitrary point.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.