The opening monologue of the 2003 film Shattered Glass:
Some reporters think it’s political content that makes a story memorable. I think it’s the people you find… their quirks, their flaws, what makes them funny, what makes them human. Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior. You have to know who you’re writing for. And you have to know what you’re good at. I record what people do, I find out what moves them, what scares them, and I write that down. That way, they are the ones telling the story.
The irony of this is that the film is about the Stephen Glass journalism scandal and the speaker is Stephen Glass himself, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one. So while the surface-level meaning of the words is true and compelling, you can’t ignore the second meaning that is informed by the “people” Glass refers to—the ones that never existed and that he made up for the sake of a good story.
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