It's no sin to tell a good story.
Because I'm a dramatist, I'm allowed to take liberties, but I want my films to be based in truth, and it's very important to me that the community we're focusing on is happy with the film. From an ethical point of view, that's everything.
I don't want to tell your story because you're a insensitive, self-centered moron. I've told a lot of stories about young people, and I always feel there's hope.
People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.
I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.
Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold.
My advice for telling someone else's story is to try not to consciously bend the story in any particular direction - to listen with an open mind, to include the good with the bad, to attempt to quell one's biases and allow the person you're writing about to emerge as wholly as possible, warts and all.
We have to be really sensitive to making sure were not creating any stories that don't feel like they're ready to be told... We have to make sure we're getting the right story and the right content from the talent we work with.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.
You don't want to be glib; you want to treat every story respectfully.
No matter who the character is and how big their role, that each person in the story is a human being and deserves respect. Even if they're in the story for ten seconds, I didn't want you to just see them as this entity passing through that's serving all of the other people.
I look at all the ingredients of a film and say, 'Is this a positive thing that I'm putting into the world? Is there honor and respect in the way the story is being told about them? And would they approve of that?'
As a writer I want everybody to get a chance to voice their opinions. If each character thinks that they're telling the truth, then it's valid. Then at the end of the film, I leave it up to the audience to decide who did the right thing.
It does not seem to me that I have the right to foist a story on people, most of whom are children who should be learning all the time, unless I am learning from it too.
Character deaths in and of itself should never be done for shock.
As a sensitive filmmaker, I think you have to really be careful in how you explore it. Not that you can't tell any story you want - I'm not calling for censorship or anything. But if you're going to have violence, I think it's important to deal with the consequences of that on a human level, not just to make people laugh.
If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?
We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.
I always make a point of keeping the most pleasant-sounding name for the murderer. As he or she is bound to come to an unpleasant end, it seems the very least the author can do.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
I often feel that with a crime story, the moral standards have to be higher. You're deal with real victims and with real consequences.
