New Zealander - Novelist | 1961 -
I'm still always surprised that anyone might be interested in my work or me.
Anthony McCarten
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Since my student days, I'd been a fan of those books with titles like 'Great Speeches that Changed the World,' as I loved the idea that the right person with the right words at the right time could really make a difference.
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One of the great things about Churchill is that he had the guts to say the unpalatable, to level with the people, even if it cost him politically to tell them the truth.
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When I was growing up in the '80s and working in the theater, David Mamet exploded with a whole new reworking of what dialogue should sound like. It was punchy and raw and repetitive, bursting with dynamic. I remember that switching on a lot of lights for me.
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I often find that writers who disavow the importance of an ending are just not very good at endings.
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There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.
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We're living in extraordinary times, all the time. The issues that assail us are perennial. They haven't changed since the Greeks picked up a pen.
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The people I'm drawn to are sort of self-created. They came from backgrounds where not much was expected of them, necessarily.
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The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.
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At some point early on, I realized that three of the greatest speeches ever delivered were by Winston Churchill, and they were written and delivered within a four-week period of each other.
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One of the real ways out of conflict is humour. It builds bridges; it's a weapon against rigid ideology, narrow thinking, intolerance.
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If it's correct to say that there is a closing of minds around the world, story is one of the most powerful agents of reviving the conversation between ideas. Ultimately, that's all stories are trying to do - open the conversation. They cannot give a proscription. It's not clairvoyant art.
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