Victor Levin Quotes

I like to write about love plus an obstacle. Not a really big obstacle; not too serious and not too funny. Just somewhere nicely in between – a combination of the two.

You want to surround yourself with people who are as dedicated to their discipline as you are to yours and let them do what they do.

It’s hard to hand a script to a director, there’s no question about it. You’ve lived with these characters, you’ve started with a blank page, especially when it’s an original work and something not based on a preexisting piece of material. But if you don’t like it, write a novel.

Believe me, you can be in the middle of a beautiful take and the next thing you know you’re awash in people crossing the street. You can’t even find your actors.

You’re not always right. You’re often wrong. But at least you’re looking at it as objectively as you can with as much experience as you can in the moment and saying, “Yeah, I think it’s funny” or “No, I don’t think it’s funny yet.”

I think everybody has a little rule follower and a little rule breaker in them.

It’s always hard, but it’s always fun to attack a premise that you think is interesting. It does take a few drafts for sure.

I knew I wanted to work in Cinemascope because I find it much more beautiful just in terms of the shape of the screen, the wider image, and it’s also less like television, which is important.

It’s funny when you put music up against picture, and all your preconceptions go away, and you start over. You just realize that that doesn’t work at all.

You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story – the best lines, the best observations – but they haven’t got enough to do with the plot to stay in.

When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I’m not interested in white hats and black hats. I don’t think that’s how people are in real life.

Sometimes you go against what they say because you believe in it anyway.

The stand-up really helped because you know the feeling when something feels true, and you know the feeling when it feels false. You don’t ever want to give an actor the feeling of it being false, because you know how unfair that is.

There are people who are put on this earth to do everything.

Your favorite story, whatever it might be, was written for one reader

My job, as I see it, is to give you a window into another world and another story, and then to be as graceful as I can so that you don’t feel my work or the editor’s work or the lens or the light or anything.