Top 100 Quotes About Screenplay

#1. I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Quotes About Screenplay #159
#2. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

David Benioff

Quotes About Screenplay #7633
#3. There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

Richard Attenborough

Quotes About Screenplay #11054
#4. A screenplay is really a blueprint for something that will be filmed. Therefore you must always keep in mind that whatever you write is going to be staged, for real.

D.J. MacHale

Quotes About Screenplay #12545
#5. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Quotes About Screenplay #17488
#6. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'

Roger Ebert

Quotes About Screenplay #20260
#7. I really just love to open a blank document and spew, whereas with a screenplay I have to be more judicious.

Diablo Cody

Quotes About Screenplay #26671
#8. Some directors, like Stevens [George Stevens], shoot full circle, 360 degrees, and that's what's right for them. I generally shoot at about a seven to one ratio. But part of that is because I've worked on every screenplay, so I'm further along in the visual concept.

Elia Kazan

Quotes About Screenplay #57148
#9. I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.

Patrick Wang

Quotes About Screenplay #60529
#10. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

Quentin Tarantino

Quotes About Screenplay #63582
#11. Scripts are what matter. If you get the foundations right and then you get the right ingredients on top, you stand a shot ... but if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don't stand a shot. It's very rare-almost never-that a good film gets made from a bad screenplay.

Tim Bevan

Quotes About Screenplay #64443
#12. Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.

Griffin Dunne

Quotes About Screenplay #66517
#13. Why does Kubrick always chill our blood, and make us huddled up scared stiff with eyes wide shut? Because even dead he's still "Shinnying" with his old hand and his eye-catching plots.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Quotes About Screenplay #83058
#14. As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

Hugo Weaving

Quotes About Screenplay #84808
#15. Winning or losing achieves the same result
change.

Shannon L. Alder

Quotes About Screenplay #86076
#16. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

Quotes About Screenplay #86207
#17. [Success] always starts with the material; it always starts with the truth and honesty of the characters that you read in the screenplay and that's rarely something that can be remedied if it's simply not there by the time you shoot the film. Thank God we had that.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Quotes About Screenplay #106950
#18. With 'Moreau,' it's been particularly confusing because I started out being the writer of the screenplay and then trying to be the director, then being moved from being the director and having to become the dog extra, it makes some kind of sense to suddenly become a character in the story.

Richard Stanley

Quotes About Screenplay #130142
#19. When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

Stanley Tucci

Quotes About Screenplay #146358
#20. I sold my first screenplay six months before 'Glee,' but they had the option for a year and now it's back with me.

Dianna Agron

Quotes About Screenplay #150483
#21. Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.

Gerard De Marigny

Quotes About Screenplay #160242
#22. I've done some stuff with Thomas Jane and Tim Bradstreet in the comic world and it was interesting to me how close to a screenplay a comic can be. Certainly a four issue comic can be a four act structured screenplay and so I would totally be for that.

Todd Farmer

Quotes About Screenplay #165208
#23. A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Deborah Moggach

Quotes About Screenplay #175639
#24. A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.

Jose Padilha

Quotes About Screenplay #195264
#25. 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.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Quotes About Screenplay #196111
#26. I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.

Christy Hall

Quotes About Screenplay #197016
#27. '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

Quotes About Screenplay #201853
#28. Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass - it's all showbiz!

Guy Maddin

Quotes About Screenplay #202025
#29. If I know what my finale is when I'm writing a screenplay, then I don't always have to chart out every scene before that. I can adequately find my way. I'm experienced enough to do that.

David Twohy

Quotes About Screenplay #205621
#30. You write a screenplay and then everybody is going to want to get in on it and we have to figure that out. I've written three screenplays that are at studios and I still haven't been making them yet so there is always something that is either going to trip something up or maybe get another pass.

Craig Brewer

Quotes About Screenplay #219159
#31. I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.

Kerry Washington

Quotes About Screenplay #229792
#32. With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Jeff Lyons

Quotes About Screenplay #241963
#33. 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.

Rupert Sanders

Quotes About Screenplay #244416
#34. I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Quentin Tarantino

Quotes About Screenplay #244735
#35. Movies are not the book. Movies are not even the screenplay. They are the movie.

Bruce Joel Rubin

Quotes About Screenplay #245490
#36. No false promises are made that if you read these pages, you will learn the formula for writing a million-dollar screenplay; in fact, the dirty little secret of screenwriting books is that anyone who promises such formulas is lying. There

Peter Hanson

Quotes About Screenplay #247961
#37. Have you ever experienced a beauty of soul, an esthetic grace, that was so intense it made you want to cry?
From Central Park Song ( A Screenplay )

Zack Love

Quotes About Screenplay #250522
#38. A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.

David Nicholls

Quotes About Screenplay #258505
#39. A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

Nicholas Meyer

Quotes About Screenplay #271684
#40. A cup of tea would restore my normality.
[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay]

Douglas Adams

Quotes About Screenplay #281501
#41. My theory is that everything in your screenplay is there to explore the theme

William C. Martell

Quotes About Screenplay #282966
#42. I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Grisham's The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn't have the right to Francis Coppola's anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay.

Francis Ford Coppola

Quotes About Screenplay #295648
#43. I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

Robert Altman

Quotes About Screenplay #301075
#44. The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.

Terry Teachout

Quotes About Screenplay #331693
#45. I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.

Ivan Reitman

Quotes About Screenplay #337782
#46. I wrote a screenplay for a 'Sweet Valley High' adaptation, and it's really amazing to me how many women who are my age have responded to the idea and are excited about the movie.

Diablo Cody

Quotes About Screenplay #348036
#47. 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.

William Monahan

Quotes About Screenplay #352500
#48. Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It's the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing 'four years later', but you can shift time in a sentence or two.

Mark Boal

Quotes About Screenplay #380975
#49. I'm on a mission
Winning Novel / Screenplay written in Hollywood

Google for updated info

Fayton Hollington

Quotes About Screenplay #384601
#50. Once I was in college, I was actually trying to write a comedy screenplay and I wrote basically the worst movie ever and just threw it away and never showed anybody. Everyone needs to get that first bad screenplay out of your system before you start writing other stuff.

Scot Armstrong

Quotes About Screenplay #388068
#51. 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.

Ashwin Sanghi

Quotes About Screenplay #388819
#52. To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

Christopher McQuarrie

Quotes About Screenplay #392869
#53. 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

Quotes About Screenplay #421721
#54. I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

Jonathan Tropper

Quotes About Screenplay #431817
#55. This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

Robert B. Parker

Quotes About Screenplay #437615
#56. 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.

Bret Easton Ellis

Quotes About Screenplay #441169
#57. I found the structure of writing a screenplay harder than the structure of writing an essay. But it was definitely challenging to force myself to sit and write. I'm not used to having to force myself to work.

Judy Greer

Quotes About Screenplay #444201
#58. I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can't learn one more thing.

Augusten Burroughs

Quotes About Screenplay #464846
#59. A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.

Dirk Benedict

Quotes About Screenplay #466267
#60. 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.

Andy Kindler

Quotes About Screenplay #477551
#61. I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

Kate DiCamillo

Quotes About Screenplay #481862
#62. If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I'll step out. I'll step back. I'd step back. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it.

Sidney Poitier

Quotes About Screenplay #502009
#63. 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.

Barry Eisler

Quotes About Screenplay #505085
#64. The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

Ridley Scott

Quotes About Screenplay #510216
#65. Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay.

Bryce Dallas Howard

Quotes About Screenplay #524858
#66. 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

Quotes About Screenplay #526461
#67. My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood.

Rani Mukerji

Quotes About Screenplay #527810
#68. There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

Charlie Kaufman

Quotes About Screenplay #528169
#69. I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who's ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that - four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar 'the Quentin.' And everybody's down with that.

Quentin Tarantino

Quotes About Screenplay #533791
#70. When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer's province.

Leigh Brackett

Quotes About Screenplay #544539
#71. The screenplay is a great document because it makes you have many discussions prior to actually being on the floor.

Robert Schwentke

Quotes About Screenplay #556675
#72. I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

Michael Arndt

Quotes About Screenplay #558015
#73. To me, the most perfect screenplay ever written will be one word, when you finally reduce it down to that. Until then, writing will be an imperfect form of communication.

Sylvester Stallone

Quotes About Screenplay #560245
#74. On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

Alan Moore

Quotes About Screenplay #570599
#75. I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

Graeme Simsion

Quotes About Screenplay #578025
#76. Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

Rod Serling

Quotes About Screenplay #593580
#77. You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

Paul Greengrass

Quotes About Screenplay #604436
#78. He [Taika Watiti] worked on this screenplay for a couple of years and just getting it right and the result is there. He's made really close to a perfect film [Hunt for the Wilderpeople] ... Perfect as you can be.

Rhys Darby

Quotes About Screenplay #618978
#79. Writing a screenplay needs to be more than words on a page - and by the way, I think the words on the page are something you have to try to execute on the highest level you can; I'm not dismissing that by any regard.

John Ridley

Quotes About Screenplay #623182
#80. You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It's like a flu bug that you catch ... Even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.

Gilda Radner

Quotes About Screenplay #638401
#81. Nine months after we submitted the original screenplay for 'The Attack,' the studio that was involved pulled out. I've been told that 'you don't write in a French way; you can't make these multicultural films.'

Ziad Doueiri

Quotes About Screenplay #645688
#82. The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

Janet Fitch

Quotes About Screenplay #662665
#83. The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.

A.D. Posey

Quotes About Screenplay #668722
#84. If I'm feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone's thing.

Josh Radnor

Quotes About Screenplay #670777
#85. 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

Quotes About Screenplay #681839
#86. Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Gene Hackman

Quotes About Screenplay #688574
#87. If you're writing a screenplay, you need to be prepared to let go: there's a good chance the words you write aren't going to be the ones that end up on screen.

Meg Cabot

Quotes About Screenplay #697552
#88. 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

Quotes About Screenplay #700538
#89. I knew I had to write a good screenplay to be taken seriously, and I knew I needed to present Mississippi on visuals instead of just saying, 'Hey I wanted to film it in Mississippi.' It would seem like it was a hometown boy just wanting to be home.

Tate Taylor

Quotes About Screenplay #716337
#90. 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.

William Monahan

Quotes About Screenplay #733272
#91. I guess the first screenplay of mine that was done was 'Falling in Love' with Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep.

Michael Cristofer

Quotes About Screenplay #733589
#92. What will you do?"
"Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie."
"What are you going to call it?"
"Hollywood."
"Hollywood?"
"Yes ...

Charles Bukowski

Quotes About Screenplay #736899
#93. I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

Richard Price

Quotes About Screenplay #749754
#94. For me, when working on a film or play or television show, everything for me starts with the screenplay and I am devoted to that and that is what I work from. Any research I do or any preparation I do on my own is all ultimately in service of that.

James Spader

Quotes About Screenplay #758791
#95. When you're writing a screenplay every scene needs to change from positive to negative, or negative to positive, and constantly trying to change the values of the movie.

Sam De Jong

Quotes About Screenplay #768944
#96. There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

Quentin Tarantino

Quotes About Screenplay #775762
#97. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

Julianna Baggott

Quotes About Screenplay #777781
#98. My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.'

Tony Kushner

Quotes About Screenplay #779407
#99. So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

Nora Ephron

Quotes About Screenplay #783260
#100. I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch.

Diablo Cody

Quotes About Screenplay #785447

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