15 Quotes by Syd Field

La cosa più difficile quando si scrive è sapere che cosa scrivere

«Τίποτα στον κόσμο δεν αξίζει όσο η επιμονή. Ούτε το ταλέντο: παντού βλέπετε αποτυχημένους ταλαντούχους.Ούτε και η ιδιοφυία: οι ιδιοφυίες που δεν τις αναγνώρισαν είναι κοινός τόπος.Ούτε η μόρφωση: ο κόσμος είναι γεμάτος παραπεταμένους μορφωμένους.Μόνο η επιμονή κι η αποφασιστικότητα είναι παντοδύναμες».

Action is character. What a person does is what he is, not what he says.

Life consists in action,′ Aristotle said, ‘and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.’ The same with Hamlet, or Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, or Neo in The Matrix: characters who have overcome their doubts and fears, then pushed them aside and acted. It is this action that elevates them into the realm of ’heroic figures.

Sometimes incidents and events in our lives bring out the best in us, or the worst. Sometimes we recover from these events and sometimes we don’t – but they always impact us. At other times how we act and react, or deal with a particular situation, reveals our “true” nature and tells us who we really are.

All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story; and without story, you have no screenplay.

There is only now, today, this present moment, this point in time. Waiting for ‘someday’ is, like striving for perfection, really just an excuse. ‘Someday’ is a concept that, to quote my mentor, Jean Renoir ’exists only in the mind, not in reality.

Joseph Campbell reflects in The Power of Myth that in mythic terms, the first part of any journey of initiation must deal with the death of the old self and the resurrection of the new. Campbell says that the hero, or heroic figure, ’moves not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward.

What’s great about writing a screenplay is that the subtext of the scene, what is not said, can sometimes be more important that what is said. Again, dialogue serves two basic functions in the scene: Either it moves the story forward or it reveals information about the character.