All the scars on my body, all the bumps and bruises, all the muscles - that is a story of everything I have done. And it's not just my story. My ancestors who came before me gave me this vessel to sculpt and mold.
A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.
I'd like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that's why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work.
If you can't sit in a cafe quietly and be ignored, how can you observe human nature and write a story?
When I was a kid going to the movies, we'd go because Bogart was in the movie, or Cagney, or John Wayne. We didn't know what the story was about or anything.
Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.
We encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch, and we give them the resources - and, crucially, the candid feedback - that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.
Francois Truffaut was my godfather on 'Sugar Cane Alley.' He believed in me and in that story, and told everyone that it should be made.
One of the pillars of 'Cyrano' is recreating a love story and, like any archetype, these great stories tend to be captivating, among other things, because they are made of those universal things that move us.
It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.
I prefer ensemble casts, but with games like 'Resident Evil 6,' where there's just so much dialogue and recording mo-cap, or with 'Resident Evil: Damnation,' where the story pace is already set by a previous set of mo-cap actors, it makes more sense to do it individually.
Every love story needs a catalyst of some sort.
People talk a lot about, 'You're a Disney princess! You're Cinderella!' and this and that. But for me, it's all about the fact that I worked with Cate Blanchett and was directed by Kenneth Branagh. That's the 'Cinderella' story for me.
The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you're telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.
In Miss Catherine Middleton we have the faintest, intoxicating glimmer of a New Age Cinderella story.
The first movie was mostly about George and Julia. This one is mostly about me and Catherine and our love story and our whole history. So it's a very different movie.
