Film Narrative Quotes & Sayings

For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film [The Hunt for Red October] should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers. — Muriel Barbery

Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol. — Suzanne Collins

The narrative that Peter Jackson has put into 'The Battle of the Five Armies,' it stands alone as a film. Rather than just finishing off the story, it's like a whole new adventure all of its own. I'm very excited about it. — Richard C. Armitage

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film. — Kevin Wilson

In narrative films, you set up reality, so you can limit the variables. You don't have that luxury with docs. — Adrian Grenier

The lumpiness of 'The Good Lie's progression - from infancy to adulthood, and from ethnic horror to gentle social comedy to a heroic gift of freedom - proclaims the film's respect for facts and truths that can't be squeezed into a smooth narrative. — Richard Corliss

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly. — Sean Penn

Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right, from the dialogue to the music to the lighting to the narrative context; everything is just perfect, and something magical happens - the film breaks through the screen and does something to you. — Jason Silva

I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film. — Jonathan Demme

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down. — Shane Carruth

My show is sort of a short-film anthology, and I'm able to tell little stories that don't necessarily carry a whole episode in terms of narrative. I like the audience not being sure what they're getting. I think it's more fun to watch something when you're discovering it as you go along. — Louis C.K.

The power of the documentary film, when done well, I think is usually more impacting than a narrative, at least for me. Documentaries are also cheaper, they are more accessible to make. — Richard Ray Perez

Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.) — Anton Yelchin

As attentive readers may have noted, the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources. Maybe mythic resonance explains part of the huge box-office appeal of a film like Pretty Woman, where Richard Gere's character trades access to his wealth in exchange for what Julia Roberts's character has to offer (she plays a hooker with a heart of gold, if you missed it). Please note that what she's got to offer is limited to the aforementioned heart of gold, a smile as big as Texas, a pair of long, lovely legs, and the solemn promise that they'll open only for him from now on. The genius of Pretty Woman lies in making explicit what's been implicit in hundreds of films and books. According to this theory, women have evolved to unthinkingly and unashamedly exchange erotic pleasure for access to a man's wealth, protection, status, and other treasures likely to benefit her and her children. — Christopher Ryan

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets. — Roger Ebert

When you're going with a huge dramatic disaster film, try to keep the narrative as simple as possible. — Jeremy Bolt

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong. — Terry Zwigoff

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films. — Stanley Kubrick

Actors can be very precious about their work and their scenes, but I think good actors have a strong understanding of narrative and are very often not as precious about that stuff. They just can't be because they understand what makes for a better film, and that it's the job of the actor to work toward that, and then if you want you can go to acting class or workshops. But making movies is not workshops. — Kristen Stewart

[My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge. — Nicolas Provost

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go. — Alison Owen

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film. — Shane Carruth

The Forbidden Room and Seances are related. Both of them are made up of lost film matter adapted through the medium of me and Evan, but the way they present themselves is totally different. One of them is this big Russian nesting doll of movie narratives and the other is much shorter experience on the internet. — Guy Maddin

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. — Tom Robbins

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it. — Ruth Ozeki

I've never been very interested in literary narrative in movies, it always seems an obligatory trait and the least interesting of all the things film can do. It forces us to look through the thing instead of at it, it teaches us to ignore our senses and look for meaning outside the immediate world of our experience. — Rick Alverson

It's impossible for one or two people to go out and shoot a narrative film; you need to have a cast, the person shooting sound, whatever. But you can legitimately have a couple people and go and do a documentary. — Jeremy Coon

Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films. — Carter Burwell

Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I'm a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn't resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There's just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out. — Guy Maddin

Tone is an interesting question because part of the inspiration of looking to song is that Geisel himself - when you think about his animated version of The Grinch - embraced the idea of using songs in unconventional ways, as part of conveying a narrative. The use of music, in this film, is very unconventional, which I love. — Christopher Meledandri

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film. — Alec Soth

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative. — Emmanuel Lubezki

I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film. — David S.Goyer

One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project. — Laura Mulvey

[Director Christopher] Nolan has not only crafted the best Batman movie, but arguably the second-best motion picture superhero narrative (topped only by the linked duo of Superman and Superman II ). For those who thought Spider-Man and X-Men had a lot to offer, wait till you see where this film goes ... Batman Begins is a strong re-start to a franchise that deserves better than it has often been accorded. — James Berardinelli

Music is such an integral part of a film and really drives the emotional narrative, it has to be integrated from the beginning. — Drake Doremus

The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film. — Barbara Kruger

I like to think traditional narrative can be subverted by an experiential narrative, by an immersion in the temporal event of the film and a a play with our expectations of that. — Rick Alverson

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about. — Tilda Swinton

Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative. — Todd Haynes

When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche. — Alfonso Cuaron

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. — Julia Bacha

no matter it's actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era. Even period pieces tell you more about the times they were made in than the times they depict — Gemma Files

It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge. — Heather Brooke

My hips bristle with totems and talismans, proof that I am not simply a character in a fixed book or film. I am no single narrative. As neither Rebecca de Winter nor Jane Eyre, I am free to revise my story, to reinvent myself, my world, at any given moment. Advancing beside Archer, I am resplendent in my savage finery of seized power. In my service charge the collected blackguards of a dozen tyrants now dispatched to a lesser oblivion. My fingers, stained crimson with the blood of despots, are not the fingers which paged through the paper lives of helpless romantic heroines. No more am I a passive damsel who waits for circumstance to decide her fate; now have I become the scalawag, the swashbuckler, the Heathcliff of my dreams bent on rescuing myself. For now do I embody all the traits I had so hoped to find in Goran. Meaning: No longer am I limited. — Chuck Palahniuk

I have come to realize that the rhythm of the film is one of narrative. I am telling the story. It is as if I were hidden behind the screen, saying: "Then such and such a thing happened." The characters don't seem to be living a life of their own, but a life that is being narrated. Perhaps that's how it should be in a fairy tale. — Jean Cocteau

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film. — Sam Taylor-Wood

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.) — Laura Mullen

I studied English Literature. I wasn't a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well. — Christopher Nolan

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic. — Edward Zwick

If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book. — Clive Owen

I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story. — Shane Black

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form. — George Hickenlooper

In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear. — Brian Lindstrom

I went back to Dallas for a little while to finish my short film 'Rusty Forkblade.' It was not the instant success I thought it was going to be. There's a false narrative that if you make a short film right after senior year, you'll be plucked out to make a feature length film, and the rest is history. I didn't do that. — Evan Daugherty

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. — E.L. Doctorow

But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special. — Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors. — Henry Jackman

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density. — Christopher Nolan

Screenwriting involves an often un-personal process. Co-writers, directors, producers, everyone has a say in what you put on a page, and stories are constantly changing according to budget, actors, and commercial needs. Films are a collaborative process and are also inherently narrative and structured, so you are always working within very tight parameters. Short fiction unleashes a more intimate voice and a passion for language. I believe short narratives can have the same amount of danger and drama as any action film. — Chiara Barzini

FABULA and SYUZHET. As defined by the film historian and theorist David Bordwell, the syuzhet is essentially the film's plot - it's the specific ordering of narrative elements within the film. The fabula, however, is more than simply the story being told; it's the story that each of us constructs as we watch and hear the syuzhet unfold. It's all the story material presented by the filmmaker, but it's also the story material and associations we bring to the film as individuals - the stories we tell ourselves based on the stories we are being told. — Ed Sikov

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative. — Jane Campion

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.' — Jonas Mekas

We all have an aggressive dedication to the narrative arts - comics, film, electronic gaming, and more. We spend much of our time and effort exploring those forms and have an enormous investment in the arts. We're all part of the same brotherhood as far as I'm concerned. — Jim Steranko

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. — Catherynne M Valente