So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.
Adrian Lyne
I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.
Aishwarya Rajesh
'Hello' was a niche film with no high levels of energy. It had no much happiness, no much dance in its screenplay. But it did a lot of good for me. I was in a negative space before it happened.
Akhil Akkineni
I like working with south Indian directors because they are very disciplined. They visualize their entire story and screenplay in their heads even before they start shooting, which I respect. They finish their work on time. Being a disciplinarian myself, this suits my style.
Akshay Kumar
If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.
Al Yankovic
On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.
Alan Moore
In my screenplays - from the very beginning I've always used tape. I talk my screenplays. And then have somebody transcribe them.
Albert Brooks
The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
All my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.
There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
Alex Garland
What your character does for a living is one of the most important choices you can make in a screenplay, even if their job is tangential to the story, because it tells you everything about the condition of their life. Are they doing what they love? Are they doing what they hate?
Alex Kurtzman
Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans' top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.
Alexandra Petri
'Y Tu Mama Tambien' is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won't take a movie that's not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.
Alfonso Cuaron
If you want me to perform in Silver Lake - where it looks like 'Vice' magazine threw up everywhere, where all the men are wearing V-necks to their belly buttons, salmon pants, and carrying a screenplay - I'll do it, because they might appreciate a Banksy joke I can't do anywhere else.
Ali Wong
I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
Alice Hoffman
I think you leave your imprint on every screenplay. I like to bring my experience as a woman to all my female characters that hopefully makes them a little more layered and complex.
Allison Schroeder
When I switched to screenplays - 'cause I had done musicals and plays - the first assignment in film school was, you have to write a silent film. And it's tremendously helpful to learn how to do that because dialogue can be a crutch. If you can master a silent film, you're golden.
I write a number of screenplays, and I've never really come up with a part for a movie star.
Andrew Dominik
I think screenplay is hard. I've tried that, and it felt really difficult; like, all the stuff I think I'm good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can't do that - or, at least, I couldn't figure out a way.
Andrew Sean Greer
Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts - works just as good for a 'N.Y. Times' op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.
Andrew Vachss
I would like Albert Brooks to have received the Oscars for best actor, best director and best screenplay for 'Modern Romance.' I love that movie.
I just write by instinct and my screenplays are often the effort of a year-long penance on a subject.
In all my screenplays, I have been exploring various aspects of femininity.
Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.
A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.
During all of my writing career - this includes when I was writing plays and my other screenplays - I don't recall ever writing a negative character, which does not mean that my characters aren't flawed or do not make mistakes. In actual fact, they all are quite flawed.
That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.
If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen. If you don't have a brilliant screenplay, then you either have amazing actors who give you the chance to improve whatever is on the page, or an interesting director who has enough faith in the project that they can carry it through and get it somewhere.
If I get lucky and I can choose, I would always choose a really good story and screenplay, even if I don't know the director. If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen.
The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.
'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.
I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.
When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get.
I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
I'm the Emily Dickinson of screenplays.
My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.
'Sunspring,' the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it's worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.
Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative.
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.
I write screenplays that don't get made and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.
I've written about 15 screenplays and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches.
Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
There comes a time as you continue to write and work on scripts and screenplays where you realize that you have opinions about the next step of the process, and you kind of want more control over the translation from page to screen.
I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.
A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.
