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Top 120 Robert McKee Quotes (2024 Update)
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Robert McKee Quote: “The dramatist is fascinated by the inner life, the passions and sins, madness and dreams of the human heart. But not the comedy writer. He fixes on the social life – the idiocy, arrogance, and brutality in society. The comedy writer singles out a particular institution that he feels has become encrusted with hypocrisy and folly, then goes on the attack. Often we can spot the social institution under assault by noting the film’s title.”
Robert McKee Quote: “First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world.”
Robert McKee Quote: “A revered Hollywood axiom warns: “Movies are about their last twenty minutes.” In other words, for a film to have a chance in the world, the last act and its climax must be the most satisfying experience of all. For no matter what the first ninety minutes have achieved, if the final movement fails, the film will die over its opening weekend.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value?”
Robert McKee Quote: “The minimalist storyteller deliberately gives this last critical bit of work to the audience.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It’s simply hypothetical.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition.”
Robert McKee Quote: “For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.”
Robert McKee Quote: “The audience knows that people rarely, if ever, understand themselves, and if they do, they’re incapable of complete and honest self-explanation. There’s always a subtext. If, by chance, what a character says about himself is actually true, we don’t know it’s true until we witness his choices made under pressure. Self-explanation must be validated or contradicted in action.”
Robert McKee Quote: “In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you’re having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. “He’s been sitting there for a long time” can’t be photographed.”
Robert McKee Quote: “An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.”
Robert McKee Quote: “As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship.”
Robert McKee Quote: “When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow, for two or more hours. They don’t go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eye at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they’d do anything to avoid in life.”
Robert McKee Quote: “As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take.”
Robert McKee Quote: “We often see films with a cast of excellent characters... except one, who’s dreadful. We wonder why until we realize that the writer hates this character. He’s trivializing and insulting this role at every opportunity. And I’ll never understand this. How can a writer hate his own character? It’s his baby. How can he hate what he gave life? Embrace all your creations, especially the bad people. They deserve love like everyone else.”
Robert McKee Quote: “We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.”
Robert McKee Quote: “At Crisis the protagonist’s willpower is most severely tested. As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we’re surprised by its relative ease. We’re left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.”
Robert McKee Quote: “Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.”
Robert McKee Quote: “No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers. We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent. No matter where a film is made – Hollywood, Paris, Hong Kong – if it’s of archetypal quality, it triggers a global and perpetual chain reaction of pleasure that carries it from cinema to cinema, generation to generation.”
Robert McKee Quote: “First, the discovery of a world we do not know.”
Robert McKee Quote: “A working imagination is research.”
Robert McKee Quote: “The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire.”
Robert McKee Quote: “To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility. Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.”
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