I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it's storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what's right for the story, I enjoy doing it.
Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are a limited amount of human stories that we tell - there's about seven of them - and of course, there's variations on those stories, and they can take place in infinite places.
I like to play with tropes.
I think that when I'm telling a story, I'm doing the best I can to tell the story as fully as I can, and if there are various fractures that happen in the story, then that's just the very thing that the story is as opposed to my looking for avenues of difference in one story. They just really do exist. For me, anyway.
...the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.
I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.
I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.
I am against great themes and great subjects... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.
There are so many tropes in 'Sex Education'; don't get me wrong. There are lots of formulaic things, but the reason they're in there is because they work, and we can rework them because people recognize them.
There's no one way of telling a story or looking at reality, so I think any device is up for grabs as long as it fits in with the tone.
If you read my short stories, there's a lot of sex in those in all different ways. To me, it's a really good, useful thing to get to have in a story. And in a movie, it's amazing, because you actually get to show things.
