I don’t really get attached to anything. I’m pretty brutal about cutting stuff. With each successful movie, I’ve discovered anything that’s not connected to the immediate story is going to be cut out of it.
I used to love to make things – you couldn’t drag me away for dinner because I was always writing a story or something.
It’s very simple, I just tell my sad story, and people weep.
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.
I’d love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they’re short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.
When you’re drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.
While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.
I like to watch many things, especially strange films and something recent, not just the story.
This is my life – I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.
Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.
In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.
Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
We have to make a disciplined effort to find out what our governments are doing in these various parts of the world and what is actually happening. We have to learn to listen to each other’s stories. Something we are not very good at.
Einstein theorized that time travel was possible, but he was looking at it as unidirectional, going forward. Traveling into the past is much more problematic, as countless stories have demonstrated!
Every film had its own grammar. And it’s your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.
You hear stories about directors using manipulation to get actors to do certain things, but I think when you’re working with professional actors, it’s all about trust. They can do anything you want, it’s just a matter of them understanding what you’re looking for, and the reason why.