If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer a director a producer and an actor I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen even the writers.

In The Touch the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Sometimes a scene may be about one thing and it may end up still being about that but the emotionality of it comes from somewhere else or the humor of it comes from somewhere else and it gives it that real-life quality.

I love making movies and hope to write my own screenplay someday and do some producing and be behind-the-scenes as well.

It's possible that I've matured as a writer and I hope I've matured emotionally but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.

I really like having a life outside work. I sometimes wish I did more career stuff and was in that Hollywood scene a bit more. But Toronto's my home.

There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting thinking to myself That scene would've been so much better if I had written it out.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

The history of Christianity therefore must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

So I decided to move that scene in the doctor's office to two-thirds into the movie after the viewers had come to know Ryan and Ali and share in their happiness.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

Inspiring scenes of people taking the future of their countries into their own hands will ignite greater demands for good governance and political reform elsewhere in the world including in Asia and in Africa.

I love Charlie Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin and it's the funniest most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

The key is just to ignore the pain because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat falls down and gets back up it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.

What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene funny scene funny scene and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.

Especially with a comedy you've got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It's not like drama where you're trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You're trying to figure out what's the funniest way to do something.

A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.