A Quote by C. S. Lewis
History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
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What makes 'The Wire' a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In 'The Wire,' bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.
I don't believe that if you do good, good things will happen. Everything is completely accidental and random. Sometimes bad things happen to very good people and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But at least if you try to do good things, then you're spending your time doing something worthwhile.
The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.
You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.
It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right.
If it ever seems to us that the world is a place where bad things only happen to good people, it is because we still believe that bad things happening to bad people is a good thing.
I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.
That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
I'm not a proponent of people watching a movie, and then going out and doing something bad. People have been doing bad things, well before movies.
Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.
I know a good story from a bad story. But when you have a really good story and they make it bad, I'll say to my wife, "Oh, tonight, I'm going to enjoy watching television because I did great, and wait until you see this." And then, they put it on and it's like - oh, that's not so good. They are fake news.
We're always trying to say things are right or wrong, bad or good. If we just chilled out, maybe things wouldn't be so hard.
There are three things that are important for a film. Number one is story, number two is story, number three is story. Good actors can save a bad script and make it bearable, but good actors can't make a bad script good - they can just make it bearable.
Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.
People have been telling me I'm a failure and that I'm doing it all wrong for 20 years now. Never trust anybody when they tell you how your story goes. You know your story. You write your own story.
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