A Quote by Anthony Browne

The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director. — © Anthony Browne
The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.
My hat's off to documentary filmmakers. I don't know if I'm ever going back to it. You're treated like a second-class citizen at most film festivals. You take the bus while everybody else is flown first-class. If you're a feature film director, you're put in a five-star hotel, and if you're a documentary director, you stay in a Motel 6.
Me and Kirby are very collaborative and it changes from film to film. The first project we worked on together, Derrida, we co-directed. The last film Outrage, I was the producer and he was the director. This film was much more of a collaboration - he is the director and I am the producer - but this is a film by both of us.
Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.
Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.
Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways.
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
We made 'Mickey and the Bear' with barely any money with a first-time director, a first-time director of photography, and a crew who had just graduated from NYU film school. We were all very much in this together for the first time. There's no famous actor or big explosions. It's not a Marvel movie. I thought nobody was going to see this film.
I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.
In Korea is what I do is I watch the playback of each take with all of the actors and spend a lot of time discussing each take. Also, I use the process we call auto-assembly because I storyboard my entire film right at the beginning, even before pre-production ever begins, so my vision is already laid out on the storyboard for everybody to share. It enables the on-set assembly person, as we call them, to cut together each take into a sequence. This enables a director to review the take within the context of the sequence of the scene.
When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.
I generally go into a movie with a very strong vision, with how I want to make the film, how I want to shoot the film, how I want to edit the movie, what I want the sound to sound like. So I have a very concrete idea even if I don't storyboard it, I know exactly what I want to do once I get into the sequence. Now having said that, I try not to let that slave me to the process. So if I do storyboard a sequence I don't necessarily stick to it if I discover more exciting things on set.
Before writing a single note of music, and even before the spotting session, I find it best to sit down with the director and just listen to him or her talk about the film - what they're trying to say, what they want the audience to understand or believe, and a thousand other similar questions. The director has most likely been living with the film for years before a composer is attached, and so the director's inclinations, desires, and understanding of the film are paramount.
The first thing I say when people ask what's the difference [between doing TV and film], is that film has an ending and TV doesn't. When I write a film, all I think about is where the thing ends and how to get the audience there. And in television, it can't end. You need the audience to return the next week. It kind of shifts the drive of the story. But I find that more as a writer than as a director.
The chasm between independent film and commercial film is now so wide. You either have to be super-famous and get a first-time director or writer's indie script off the ground, or you're a newcomer and go and put a cape on for four years.
A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper.
I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.
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