A Quote by Tom Schulman

I want to know my whole story works before I start working. — © Tom Schulman
I want to know my whole story works before I start working.
Sometimes I'm considered, I guess, a subtle actor. Maybe I'm less of a showman and more just trying to tell the story. I don't know what the perception is. I just want to tell the story so the story as a whole works as opposed to just making sure that I work.
I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!
You don't have to try to get a job and go through set steps before you start a career or start your life. That's what I want young girls to know - you can do anything you want. Just start.
I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.
You don't have to wait for anyone's approval to do things. You don't have to try to get a job and go through set steps before you start a career or start your life. That's what I want young girls to know - you can do anything you want. Just start.
I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. I never know where the story will go but I just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.
I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!
I've found great virtue in two-thirds of the way into the message; right before I'm really want to nail home a point, pausing to tell a joke or to tell a light-hearted story, because I know my audience has been working with me now for 20 or 25 minutes. And if I can get them to laugh, get oxygen into their system, it wakes up those who might be sleeping, so there's something about using a story to draw people back in right before you drive home your final point. In that case I think it's real legitimate just to use a story for story's sake.
I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards because in the end that's what the art that I'm working with is.
I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
The biggest threat to your creativity is the fear that it's already been done, said, created. (So why bother?) Say it, do it, make it anyway - but tell YOUR story along the way. The story of how you came to know what you know. The story of what you want to know more of. The story of why you do what you do. The story of how you came to care. And that's how you create what's never been created before.
Gettting to know your characters is so much more important than plotting. Working out every detail of your story in advance, especially when you don't yet know your main characters, always seems a little too much like playing God. You're working out your characters' lives, their destiny, before they've had a chance to discover who they are and what kind of people they want to be.
The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.
I'm not saying that if you're working at home, raising a family, that's not work. I want to disrupt the narrative around what it means to be a woman who works. The whole point of my brand is that women should be architecting the lives they want to live.
Praise works best at the start, before the miracle, before the breakthrough, before the restoration.
The voice for 'Surly' is, of course, very close to my own voice, but it's informed a lot by this story, by the arc and the animation and working with the whole creative team on 'The Nut Job' in finding what really works.
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