Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My house is basically like Halloween, 365 days a year, with my son.
An emotional story is an emotional story no matter how big or small it is.
I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.
There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill.
When you start a script you aim to hit a note you know you want to end in general.
I am a crazy fan of movies like 'The Wild Bunch' or 'Wages of Fear,' where you're rooting for the bad guys.
I do believe that people go to the movies - for one reason or another - they go to the movies to have an experience.
You always go by your gut. That's the best you can do. You go by what you feel, and you say yes or no based on what it inspires in you.
In fact, we actually listen to fans all the time. It's helpful because you want to get a sense of what people are looking for and what they disagree with.
When you're a kid and you're a superhero lover, the holy trinity is Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, so to be able to take any of those and play with it is a huge joy.
When you're a kid, and you're a superhero lover, the holy trinity is Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, so to be able to take any of those and play with it is a huge joy.
I think we invite people into our living rooms every week through the television because we have emotional connections to them, or they make us laugh or reflect some part of ourselves that we want to live in.
I think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.
The thing for me, and I can only really judge this by what I respond to myself as an audience member, I really only respond to a movie if I'm interested in the people who are in it. It's really that simple. If I'm not, then it's all noise.
By actually taking Sleepy Hollow and the Rip Van Winkle story, and finding the spirit of what was great about both of them and putting them together. So it felt, actually, like one of those ideas that clicked for us, right away, on instinct.
With a series, keeping the quality high and writing incredibly fast, that's the first lesson you learn. You can't be real precious. When you're doing a feature film, you have 2 1/2 months; you sort of take your time. It's a different animal.
We were such fans of Sleepy Hollow, in all of its iterations - growing up with the Disney show, and then Tim Burton's and, obviously, the most important being Washington Irving's short story. It evokes and invokes a very specific feeling and tone.
When I was a kid, going to Universal Studios, which was all I wanted to do, all the time, there was a show that was all the monsters, and I loved that show. I was obsessed with Dracula. I was obsessed with Frankenstein. I was obsessed with the Wolfman.
The bad guy in any good storytelling is always, in some weird way, a mirror for your hero's journey and for the challenges that they are facing and is some weird physical externalization of that fear that the character is holding onto and has to overcome.
When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.
I think that the line between television and features started to blur a couple years ago. The standards started to become the same, which is that the idea had to be very loud. The show didn't have to be loud; the idea had to be loud. It had to cut through the clutter.
In one way or another, everybody has this experience in their lives... the moment when you have to define your relationship to family and how your family's made you who you are, whether you've spent your life running from your family or deeply connected to your family.
What your character does for a living is one of the most important choices you can make in a screenplay, even if their job is tangential to the story, because it tells you everything about the condition of their life. Are they doing what they love? Are they doing what they hate?
I think what all the Universal monster movies are defined by, and what makes them very special, is that it's really the only genre entirely unto itself, in which you fear the monster and fear for the monster. That's a very hard thing to do. To fear for and fear at the same time is extremely unique.
I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.
Here's what I'll say: some toys should be movies, and some toys should not be toys, and I'd like to believe we know the difference between those two things. The movies that work, work when there is a story there that you can take the toy out of, but when you put the toy in, it becomes an even more amazing experience for whatever reason.
You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.
I asked a director once what the secret of it all was, and he said you have to be so prepared that you are willing to throw all your preparation away in the moment when you see something better. That's a phenomenal piece of advice. It's been my compass through the process of making films. But you can really only do that if you're prepared. You can't wing it.
As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.
I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.
When you're working on a scene, both in the script phase and also in the moment, you look around and you wait for the lightning bolt to strike you and based on your instincts tell you what the right thing to do is here. And that can result in anything from a change of dialogue to the realisation that what you thought was a dramatic scene should actually have some humour. And maybe if you stage it this way it's funnier, or if you put the camera here it tells a different story. That stuff is kind of everything when you're a director.