Theme

"I don't even bother doing any work on a story until I know how it ends and what theme I'm exploring, whatever theme means to me. So, I need to know those things just from like, you know, doing the dishes or in Mel's case, is going on a run or something like that. I need to have that in my head as inspiration before I even start doing other work."

"what is the story about but a log line is so much more concise like when i say what is the story about i want to talk about themes i want to talk about character. I want to talk about story. I want to talk about vibe."

"Ethos, logos, and pathos is what I think about. So ethos being who you are in relation to the audience. Why should they listen to you? What's your position? Logos is the structure, and that's the joke structure. Are the jokes funny? Do they work as jokes? Does the story make sense? Does the story follow? Does it, if it is non-linear, are all the pieces in place? Do they come back in a satisfying way? Does the logos work? And then pathos, why do I care? And that's, you know, that can be sad or it can be, it doesn't need to be sad, but it is incredibly important. You know, if this math professor is telling you math problems that all make sense, I don't give a shit. Are these math problems relevant to my life? Maybe I give a shit."

"The big thing I've taken away from this, and it's come from you, Alice, is ethos, logos, and pathos. I think they're all forms of theme. The way that screenwriters think about theme is actually all those things intermingled, right? You've got Logos, which is the overall structure, can be what the theme is about. And even though we didn't talk directly to Inside, the structure of Inside, the way it's structured, is what it is about, more than the ending itself."

"If you say my life makes sense, then what you're saying is the actions that I take have meaning. And if you say my life makes no sense, then what you're saying is the actions in my life are of no consequence. So in some way, plot at the beginning of a story like that is where the character kind of thinks that they are part of something -- society and a group of relationships, and they can make sense of themselves. Plot is important or has a value. And if they go through their journey and they begin to realize that actually no one cares for them, that society has no interest in them, that there is no way that they're going to fit into this world and there is no place for them -- by the end of that story you only have character. There's no plot. It doesn't matter what Johnny does. Nobody cares."