A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.
You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.
You don't go to your 9 to 5 and share every story with your coworkers, and in the same way, not every YouTuber shares every story with their audience.
The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.
Everything runs its course. We had told a lot of stories that happened in our life. My kid was getting older, and we were running out of stories to tell.
It's a hard line to walk, man. Cause you know you want to make this movie, you want to make it dark and real, you want to show all this stuff but unfortunately you can't always do that.
At a certain point the audience shouldn't worry about catching every word and understanding every twist and turn, because at a certain point that's pretty much impossible.
I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.
I always feel in movies, I don't know if it's because I'm jaded, but I always feel like we don't go far enough.
I want to make the world real. I have to be able to believe that it could happen. I can't put Pegasus in my stories because horses can't fly. It's just a quirk in my brain.
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
I don't think it's a director's job to peek behind the curtain too much.
I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.
Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.
I can't imagine something worse than scripts being written into a tunnel, thinking, 'I don't know when this ends. I don't know.' It usually ends when people get sick of it, but I think it's great when it gets to end on its own terms.
The problem with prequels is you're limiting yourself as to where it can go.
I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.
The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.
Sometimes you can do a TV show on a subject you just can't do in film. Either it's too long or studios will perceive it as not being commercial.
Before 'Fallen,' I'd written love stories and more love stories. I'd fallen in love with love stories - but they were also beginning to feel just a little bit too insular, too small.
There's only so much you can do with an attorney on a show that's about New York policemen.
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?
I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
