Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
I hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.
You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.
I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.
I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.
I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.
Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.
I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.
Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.
When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.
A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.
Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.
I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.
When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.
There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.
Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.
I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.
Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.
If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.
I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.
T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.
I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition.
When they see you get what you want and move on, quickly, you've done a contract with the crew from that point. In Britain if the sparks call you Guv on day two, you never need an award of any other kind.
Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.
I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying "the script" this and "the script" that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
I think that scripts should be published, but they are published, really, because when you're a screenwriter, your stuff ends up in samizdat form on thousands and thousands of desks and shelves across the industry.
Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.
I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.
I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.
When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.
London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.
For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.
There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.
As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around.
All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, "It's very visual, isn't it," and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.
I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called "first time director" to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.
I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory.
I've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it will never be my living and I know it. Plus it never moved fast enough for me and lacked cut and thrust. I need to be in the real show.
The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.