Ultimately, the people [who] are going to help you make your film are the people who believe in you and believe in the story. And as long as you stick to your guns, hopefully what you come out with will be what you imagined.
I'm not sure I can name a kind of story that wouldn't work in comics form. It's words and images, and we've been telling all kinds of stories with that combination since theatre was invented thousands of years ago.
The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.
In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.
People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.
I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
Why ruin a good story with the truth?
Kiran says (the shelf) is full of stories. If it is, then I like fairy stories. Fairy stories are fair. In them wishes are granted, words are enchanted, the honest and brave make it safely through to the last page and the baddies either have to give up their wickedness for ever and ever, no going back, or get ruthlessly written out of the story, which they hardly ever survive. Also in fairy stories there are hardly any of those half-good half-bad people that crop up so constantly in real life and are so difficult to believe in.
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.
Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?
In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.
Our story is a 'once upon a time', but it's not a 'happy ever after'.
In fiction, you can be as true as you want. Real life is a different story.
I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
New York in a way functions as another character within the story, as it does within most of Woody Allen's stories.
I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.
When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.
