Quotes About Adaptation

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

Of course having a baby derails the writing process for some time. And I will be the first to say that I have essentially no social life, because there's just nothing left after being a mom, professor, and writer. I used to be big into rock climbing. No more. A lot falls by the wayside.

I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

The real writing of a piece comes only when you are performing it. It is why I like theatre. In film and TV, the image is locked forever, but in theatre, there is constant change; each performance is part of the writing process.

It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.

Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can't be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

'Sleepless' was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

I write differently from the way Glen used to. I haven't written very much lately, I mean, since I've been in the group, but I'm starting to now more. And just the fact that I'm there instead of Glen means that the others do everything differently. Cos they have to adapt it to, like, fit in with me, do you know what I mean?

After a while, though, the group just wasn't a good vehicle for the songs I'd written.

We used to take two years to complete a film, and sometimes, we used to be told on the sets that the scenes are still being written. Everything today is pre-planned.

It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. 'The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War' is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.

I must have written 15 lyrics for 'The Lion King,' and only five or six were used. Some were scenes that disappeared, some were earlier versions of songs that didn't work, or else the characters changed.

I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.

Musicals are written in English, and then we import them to Japan. When we translate them into Japanese, the sounds of the language are completely different. The Japanese language is not the best for singing, in terms of sound.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.

It's best to keep things as free and open as you can. It's good to have a template, but then you go back and dissect it and see where you can make improvements. That's pretty much been the case with every Priest song that's ever been written.

I bought the rights to this book, 'The Ploughmen,' by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I've written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It's really hauntingly beautiful. It's got some suspense and great drama, but it's a real character thing.

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical.

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.