Is good storytelling a lost art?
Robert McKee: No, I don’t think it’s a lost art, but I think it has lost energy. The ability to tell great stories today is alive and well. It’s just that due to certain restraints, the tendency today is toward spectacle over substance. It’s not just in film, but it holds true with the theatre, the most extravagant forms of theatre, and the often vastly overwritten novels that are published today. There’s a tendency today in all media to substitute spectacle for substance. But storytelling has gone through bad periods like this in the past. As was true 100 years ago in both the novel and the theatre, we’re going through another period again where the storytelling is atrophying underneath the effort of too many writers being drawn to the surface and not the substance of their work, and they produce works that are dazzling on the surface but often hollow. For this reason, I think the best storytelling in the world today tends to be on television, because the television screen does not le
