On Story

John August:
Specificity is like one of those terrible traps.

John August:
You can get locked in to be telling so many story points so quickly that it suffocates the moment.

John August:
Everything in Alien breathes and takes a good long time and that's part of the reason why it has such suspense.

Ashley Miller:
This was a lived-in universe that you recognized, it was very naturalistic.

Ashley Miller:
The hero was now the woman.

Ashley Miller:
You know that all bets are off, but you don't even know how far the bets are off.

John August:
Horror film science fiction was never the same.

Vince Gilligan:
I'm gonna take a very bland guy, and turn him into a bad guy.

Vince Gilligan:
The French connection was visually an inspiration for Breaking Bad.

Vince Gilligan:
Walter White is the antithesis of a criminal, where as Jesse Pinkman should have never been a criminal.

Vince Gilligan:
The big concern was keeping it real.

Craig, Peter:
Crime is an excuse to dig deeper and deeper into a character and realize that he's committed crimes according to all the people outside going way back, deeper than the story begins.

Craig, Peter:
Each new thing you learn about Sonny, the story is completely reinvented and that's what makes it so incredibly interesting.

Swicord, Robin:
We're not even three minutes into the movie, and it's already interesting.

Swicord, Robin:
One thing that you want out of a heist movie is you want to know that there was a plan and then when the plan starts to go wrong, that's when it's interesting.

Craig, Peter:
How different Sonny and Sal are actually becomes one of the biggest parts in the movie.

Craig, Peter:
It's immersive. It's brilliant.

Swicord, Robin:
He wants what he deserves and what's coming to him because he has served his country.

Craig, Peter:
It's that great '70s ending to a movie where you end on somebody's look, a look of just total understanding and realization for the first time.

Frank Darabont:
I was delighted with The Mist to actually get back to my roots, and make what I considered to be a horror movie.

Frank Darabont:
I thought it was one of the most lovely stories of the rarest kind, it's a love story between two male friends.

Frank Darabont:
The guy I tend to love the best is the guy who's trying to find his moral center.

Beau Willimon:
What interested me about Francis Underwood was the sort of Shakespearean character for whom there was no sense of limits, you know, an utterly liberated person.

Beau Willlimon:
He's a person who's all about what is possible, not what limits him.

Beau Willimon:
Really I'm telling the story of characters who want things and are going after them.

Beau Willimon:
I want to do something radical, I want to dramatize a successful marriage.

Beau Willimon:
Power pervades all of our lives, it's not limited to politics. Power is about interpersonal relationships.

Beau Willimon:
The very first thing I said to Fincher is, I don't want this to be a show about politics, I want it to be a show about a marriage.

Solomon, Ed:
Everyone did better than I'd imagined, and that was awesome.

Solomon, Ed:
I remember going to a screening of it, and watching it in its final form, and walking out into the lobby, and sitting down into a corner and crying, in a good way, but crying like 'oh my god, it worked out.

Solomon, Ed:
I am so lucky that that hit, I'm so lucky that these incredible people worked on it.

Solomon, Ed:
Nobody wanted to direct it, nobody.

Solomon, Ed:
You think its one thing and then it turns out to be something totally different, and then it turns out to be something different from that.

Solomon, Ed:
Will [Smith] would add, and it would be spot on, and Tommy [Lee Jones] would cut, and it would be spot on.

Solomon, Ed:
There were lines in Men in Black that I couldn't have written, that Will [Smith] kind of winged and got it right on.

Nyswaner, Ron:
You know, I was so blessed to be apart of this movie, Philadelphia.

Nyswaner, Ron:
When I watch that film what I'm really seeing is a family album of a lot of lost relatives, in a way.

Nyswaner, Ron:
The central relationship in that movie is between Tom Hanks' character, Andrew, and Denzel Washignton's character, Joe.

Nyswaner, Ron:
My nephew had just been diagnosed with AIDS. What most people forget that in 1988 when you were diagnosed with AIDS that was a death sentence.

Nyswaner, Ron:
So we responded to that tragedy by trying to make a movie, but it took us a long time to find the story to tell within that theme.

Nyswaner, Ron:
We started with: Let's make a movie about AIDS.

Nyswaner, Ron:
Being inspired by a story that was a lawsuit and realizing that the best way to tell a story about AIDS that would attract an audience is to tell it in a familiar, entertaining genre.

Nyswaner, Ron:
The characters that intrigued me are characters who don't know quite the life that they are supposed to live.

Nyswaner, Ron:
The types of people don't interest me, what interests me is that the characters have something in them that is unresolved.

McKinnon, Ray:
I spent a large part of my career as an actor and writing in the closet.

McKinnon, Ray:
Because of my acting training and because I like to perform I definitely read aloud these characters and try to approach it like an actor approaches a character.

McKinnon, Ray:
Each character is on their own existential journey.

McKinnon, Ray:
We are all continually trying to find and redefine the meaning of life.

McKinnon, Ray:
Part of what I'm doing, subconsciously, is using them to find my own meaning in my life.

McKinnon, Ray:
I was trying to represent a kind of realism that's different than say The Accountant of other shows I've done.

McKinnon, Ray:
Rule number one: Write what interests you.

Khouri, Callie:
With Thelma and Louise, I was called to it.

Khouri, Callie:
Fortunately and unfortunately, that is the greatest writing experience I've ever had.

Khouri, Callie:
I just wanted to see if I could finish it, because up until then, that had been my biggest problem was finishing anything.

Orci, Roberto:
It's emotional logic, that's what you're looking for in screenwriting.

Johnson, Rian:
That's very liberating I think, to realize you are creating your own system.

Orci, Roberto:
Why are you telling a time travel story? Well I'm not doing it for the gimmick, I'm doing it to find out whether my dad was a better man than what I thought he was.

Johnson, Rian:
You always sync into the quagmire of time travel logic, it makes absolutely no sense, and there's no reason why the Polaroid version should start disappearing, fading out limb by limb. But its genius because it makes perfect narrative sense.

Orci, Roberto:
For one of the few times ever in one of a big popcorn movie, we actually used the most advanced rules of time travel.

Johnson, Rian:
The golden thing I think is when you can create that operating system and its also, on a deeper level, a portrait of your main character.

Johnson, Rian:
The golden bell we're all looking to ring is when those rules define your main character.

Kelly, Richard:
It's fun to try and use science to create parameters and rules and enough logic so that you can feel like you're giving the audience some, like an operating system.

Ellis, Kirk:
It's gotta be one of the grubbiest and one of the most unpromising introductions for a major character in the history of Westerns.

Ellis, Kirk:
You're always wanting your introductory scenes of characters to be this microcosm of the whole film.

Ellis, Kirk:
Its gonna deal with the fact that there is an obsession with weaponry on the frontier.

Ellis, Kirk:
There is a very very fine line in the west that divides the good men from the bad men, so fine, in fact, that you cant actually define good and bad anymore.

Ellis, Kirk:
Westerns are all about how you cant escape who you are.