Home /
Quotes /
Compress Quotes

Compress Quotes

To compress is to make hard choices: what stays, what goes, and how to keep meaning intact when space runs short. This collection of compress quotes draws mostly from filmmakers and composers describing how they condense novels, music, and true stories into something tighter without losing their essence.

Adapting a novel for the screen almost always means finding the right Dramatic shape within a much shorter running time.

Last Updated on May 30, 2021

Dramatic
|
Nov 07, 2020

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

Quotes by Tom Perrotta

Nov 07, 2020

Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.

Quotes by Sally Hawkins

Half
|
Nov 07, 2020

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

Quotes by Rajkumar Hirani

Music
|
Nov 07, 2020

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

Quotes by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Nov 07, 2020

Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.

Quotes by John Lee Hancock

Life Story
|
Nov 07, 2020

I take a whole life story and compress it into three minutes.

Quotes by Harlan Howard

Look
|
Nov 07, 2020

You learn tricks to make action look more dynamic - having the fight come toward you or shooting on a longer lens to compress the speed.

Quotes by David Leitch

Nov 07, 2020

With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.

Quotes by Cary Fukunaga

These quotes on compressing time and detail pair well with our Feature Film quotes, and with broader reflections on Action and pacing.

Famous Topics

Top 10 quotes