Top 50 Melissa Rosenberg Quotes
#1. Women, in general, are very passionate fans, and that's what you love about them.
Melissa Rosenberg
#2. Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.
Melissa Rosenberg
#3. TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.
Melissa Rosenberg
#4. I remember when I was a dancer and I had to do this performance and I was really nervous about it, and I happened at that moment to go see 'Flashdance.' I mean, it's silly, but I walked out of that movie going 'what a feeling!' I walked out with confidence.
Melissa Rosenberg
#5. I got so lucky on my 'Red Widow' cast. It was just the universe looking out for me that I got those actors. It's a big ensemble cast, a very international cast. I don't know how that happened.
Melissa Rosenberg
#6. Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.
Melissa Rosenberg
#7. Jessica Jones is the first female superhero Marvel's ever introduced as a lead.
Melissa Rosenberg
#8. Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With 'Twilight,' they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They're very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.
Melissa Rosenberg
#9. With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.
Melissa Rosenberg
#10. Everyone is given one gift, a reason for being, and it's our obligation to do something with it. Obviously, it's a challenge - but if you're not taking the bull by the horns, I have no patience for you. You're just taking up space.
Melissa Rosenberg
#11. Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I've done it all.
Melissa Rosenberg
#12. In 'Twilight,' you're setting up the world. You're introducing the world, and I was also writing in a vacuum because I didn't know who the actors were going to be. Now you're going to 'New Moon' and 'Eclipse,' and I could write specifically to them in my mind. So it becomes a more comfortable world.
Melissa Rosenberg
#13. I'm not saying that 'Twilight' is, you know, some brilliant Oscar-winner, it's not 'Dr. Zhivago.' It's not trying to be. Because it is a female fantasy. I would argue that it's actually a universal fantasy. Which is, the fantasy being to be loved and cherished for exactly who you are.
Melissa Rosenberg
#14. When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.
Melissa Rosenberg
#15. In in some ways Jessica Jones and Supergirl are the opposite of one another, they both happen to have superpowers. But, in terms of the lack of parity, I think it is a good start and this is just the beginning I hope.
Melissa Rosenberg
#16. With 'Twilight,' you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With 'Penoza,' we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there's a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.
Melissa Rosenberg
#17. Don't give up. You're going to get kicked in the teeth. A lot. Learn to take a hit, then pick yourself up off the floor. Resilience is the true key to success.
Melissa Rosenberg
#18. That's how I operate best. I just ignore feelings and jump right into the next thing.
Melissa Rosenberg
#19. What I want is to be the highest grossing screenwriter, or to have some other woman be the highest grossing screenwriter, instead of being number nine on the list. That's my goal.
Melissa Rosenberg
#20. I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.
Melissa Rosenberg
#21. What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I'm not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women's roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places ... I'm thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles.
Melissa Rosenberg
#22. I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don't find that as interesting as one who's really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Melissa Rosenberg
#23. I'm a little jaded about change actually happening, I'll admit. The numbers are exactly the same as they were two decades ago, in terms of the number of female leads, or people behind the camera, all of that. I'll certainly do my part, and I feel like Jessica Jones is a great step.
Melissa Rosenberg
#24. Jessica Jones is its own animal, I think each one of these series is its own animal. There is some connective tissue, in terms of referencing the Marvel Universe, but it glances off of the other stories.
Melissa Rosenberg
#25. I think going into 'New Moon,' I knew the characters better. I knew the world better and I knew the actors who would be playing these roles. I had a sense of their rhythms and tones. 'Twilight' I was writing in a vacuum. We hadn't cast it yet.
Melissa Rosenberg
#26. The film industry sees the writer as fungible: The thinking goes, As long as we have Brad Pitt and all this money, we have a great film! No, you need a writer with voice and an engaging story, or what you have is a bomb.
Melissa Rosenberg
#27. I have a very strict regimen of showing up at my desk at a certain hour with my cup of green tea. It is very quiet. I don't like having a lot of atmosphere around.
Melissa Rosenberg
#28. I think one of the major differences between Wonder Woman and Jessica Jones is that Wonder Woman is iconic and much better known, so you get into a lot of ridiculous expectations, like what's her costume going to look like? Well, nobody knows who Jessica Jones is, except for fangirls and boys.
Melissa Rosenberg
#29. The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.
Melissa Rosenberg
#30. Trish "Patsy" Walker is just one of my favorite characters and she was a big comic character in the '40s.
Melissa Rosenberg
#31. When you have a show that's called Jessica Jones, if Jessica Jones isn't in a scene the rest of it become almost irrelevant until you earn other character storylines. You've got to flesh out those characters enough that you can travel.
Melissa Rosenberg
#32. One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.
Melissa Rosenberg
#33. With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like 'OK, they can fly; now they can't fly.'
Melissa Rosenberg
#34. I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.
Melissa Rosenberg
#35. If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.
Melissa Rosenberg
#36. I have been working in television for quite a long time. In television, the writer is the constant, and the director is rotated in and out. I am very use to dealing with people's methods. And perspectives.
Melissa Rosenberg
#37. That was, in writing the 'Twilight' script I had about five weeks to write that. I'd taken about a month to write the outline and then it was slam into a script and write it down fast because the writer's strike was looming.
Melissa Rosenberg
#38. I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.
Melissa Rosenberg
#39. When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.
Melissa Rosenberg
#40. The Daredevil comic book was the first comic book Marvel had ever put out that was an adult R-rated book, so I started with that. When I was creating the series, I just started with that tone, and that edge, and it just kept going.
Melissa Rosenberg
#41. It doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the room: If you're not someone who people want to be around, you won't get far. Likewise for helping those in line behind you. I take seriously my role as a mentor to young female filmmakers - I make sure my time is tithed.
Melissa Rosenberg
#42. I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.
Melissa Rosenberg
#43. My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for 'Twilight,' although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.
Melissa Rosenberg
#44. The number of vacations me and my husband have canceled ... if you really want a job, book a non-refundable vacation. But obviously we're blessed too.
Melissa Rosenberg
#45. I stay off the Internet, because I'm very sensitive to commentary. There could be 10 comments of 'Fabulous job!' and one 'She's horrible!' and it completely throws me.
Melissa Rosenberg
#46. I love that as a theme for women: Stop standing by! You've got to make stuff happen! You've got to create your own world because if you let other people do it, they're going to just screw you.
Melissa Rosenberg
#47. My plan is, I'm in the process of creating a production company called Tall Girls productions. I want to be doing both film and television. I'll never leave television. I just love working in it too much.
Melissa Rosenberg
#48. With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.
Melissa Rosenberg
#50. Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.
Melissa Rosenberg
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