Screenplay Quotes - page 4

I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran, asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, ... Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel. (Emma Thompson)
Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes. View quote
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy. View quote
Mickey Rourke
We are trying to celebrate in the new album -- 90 Miles [coming out in the summer of 2007] is the fact that after almost 50 years our homeland [Cuba] is not ours. We have amazing musicians on board preparing this album, and some continue to come on board. It's all new music we've written - all new stuff . . . No relaxing for me . . . I've got the Connie Francis screenplay I'm working on, which we just finished. We have a producer . . . I've got to meet the director that I'm going to go hammer . . . I've been working on it since 2000 with Connie Francis, who is darling. Plus, I'm a mommy . . . I take her [12-year-old Emily] to games, take her to school, pick her up . . . We're women, we're used to [constantly juggling responsibilities]. View quote
Gloria Estefan
I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen. View quote
William Gibson
On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable. View quote
Alan Moore
David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet. View quote
Tom Hardy
I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. View quote
Nora Ephron
About a year ago I got really exhausted from reading bad scripts and I know that I am a writer and that I have stories to tell, so I thought, 'Let's do this!' So I'm co-writing a screenplay now with another screenwriter and loving it. Absolutely loving it. And I would like to be the producer on the project and of course the lead is me. View quote
Kerry Washington
If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically. View quote
Bret Easton Ellis
If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious. (Tom Hiddleston)
For me, when working on a film or play or television show, everything for me starts with the screenplay and I am devoted to that and that is what I work from. Any research I do or any preparation I do on my own is all ultimately in service of that. View quote
James Spader
I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey. View quote
John Irving
I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson! View quote
Erich Segal
Your mind flies free and you see yourself as an actor, condemned to a treadmill wherein men and women conspire to breathe life into a screenplay that allegedly depicts life as it was in the old wild West. View quote
Sterling Hayden
Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay. View quote
Elmore Leonard
As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional. View quote
Hugo Weaving
Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern. View quote
James Cameron (director)
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies and I'm a better moviemaker than I a would be writer. View quote
Ridley Scott
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that. (Francis Ford Coppola)
I no longer do a film for the wrong reasons. I have to be convinced ethically and morally. Both the director and I have to be on the same page. There are just five songs in most films these days, and they have to be amazing. There has to be a twist in the screenplay. The editing has to be crisp. Your hard work should show, but effortlessly. View quote
Salman Khan