Quotes About Screenplay

You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

Roles don't fascinate me. It is the narrative, the screenplay that is fascinating.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket... the least understood and the least noticed.

I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn't bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I'd bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with.

In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.

Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I'm sure it's terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn't know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.

I have a reading problem and it's hard for me to read books. But I had no problem with the 'Emerald Forest' script.

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.

Whether it's writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don't ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.

A screenplay adaptation of my 'Punktown' novel 'Health Agent' has been making the rounds. The screenplay was written by my friend, singer/songwriter Walter Egan of 'Magnet & Steel' fame!

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.

Bollywood movies ignore screenplay, if you notice whichever movie is a hit has an interesting screenplay.

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

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.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

I wrote my first screenplay on a lark, because it was a storytelling format that felt like a familiar shorthand - we all watch movies, don't we? But even though I grew up in Los Angeles, my family was entirely unconnected with the movie industry, and I never truly believed that it would one day be my fate.

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.

When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.

The one that I've always wanted - and I have Scott Rudin in my way blocking it - is 'Blood Meridian,' which Cormac McCarthy has offered to adapt into a screenplay.

In marriage, there's a lot of ignoring each other, which is hard to fake on-screen.