Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Screenplay. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Screenplay Quotes And Sayings by 96 Authors including Karyn Kusama,Peter Landesman,William Monahan,Bryce Dallas Howard,Malcolm Mcdowell for you to enjoy and share.
We have to accept that making movies is a never-ending process of occasional progress, frequent setbacks, and unexpected curveballs being thrown our way. Navigating that process requires stamina, curiosity, openness, and creative fire.
I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.
When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay.
There are no great scripts - just great films.
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.
The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.
When you're a screenwriter, it's like being a mechanic. You open the hood of the story, the director is the driver, and he says, "What do you think? It's a little tough."
Scripts don't get movies made.
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.
The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.
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.'
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.
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.
Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.
Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.
The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.
You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000-dollar-a-week writers and I will write it myself.
I approach directing from an actor's standpoint.
Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.
Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.
Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.
I wouldn't know a good script if it bit me in the face.
Ninety-five per cent of films are born of frustration, of self despair, of ambition for survival, for money, for fattening bank accounts. Five per cent, maybe less, are made because a man has an idea, an idea which he must express.
The screenplay is a great document because it makes you have many discussions prior to actually being on the floor.
Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'
When you're starting out, you know, you have to do something on a very limited budget. You're not going to be able to have great actors, and you're most likely not going to have a great script.
If you want to be a great director, be a great screenwriter.
Writer is a Film Director of letters.
Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
Screenplays aren't written to be read, they're written to be made into movies.
A script is utterly useless in and of itself; it's only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being.
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 ...
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
I'm on a mission
Winning Novel / Screenplay written in Hollywood
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When you make a film, you come to say something.
Show me a bad script and I will show you a big payday.
The secret of making movies is having the strongest possible script.
Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.
I guess the first screenplay of mine that was done was 'Falling in Love' with Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep.
Write the kind of movie you would want to see, in a genre you love.
When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
It is rare that you read scripts that genuinely move you and make you feel that, regardless of the commercial possibilities, you have to make the film.
From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.
Most screenplays I receive are boring, and some are straight-out bad.
A great screenplay is the most powerful bait in Hollywood.
There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.
I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.
I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.
The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story.
Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
I find reading screenplays difficult, as they're only a roadmap for what a movie might end up being.
I believe that the director is really the soul. It is a collaborative effort, but the director is the one who needs to have that vision. It could be a great script, but it starts from there. You need to have good material, at least, but if you don't have someone with vision, it's just words.
When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read ... if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.
Movies are usually difficult, often insane, constantly challenging and always strangely amusing to make.
The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.
Filmmaking is a difficult process. There are the logistics of making a film. You have to do your part, and then change the entire thing around to do someone else's part. A lot of the magic is lost, in between that, and you have to figure out how to get it back.
What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.
When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking.
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that's it.
I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
I wrote several screenplays over the years to really polish my craft and learn from my mistakes.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
Director and producers have to take all the risks they can. We developed this film with the possibility to create departing from a blank page and to discover things as the process went along and as we understood the things that at first we couldn't understand in words.
Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.
Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.
I'm developing some screenplays at the moment with my Australian producer.
A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.
By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.
We are now, all of us, cinematographers for the movie of our own lives. Not the star. Not the director. Not even the writer.
When you first start out as an actor, you're just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you're being held responsible for the movies themselves, you're looking for a good script all around.
Most screenplays depend primarily on the vision of a director.
A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you're good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn't last long and you're quickly discarded.
Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.
Moviemakers can be late to a subject, or afraid, but often they are brave and ahead of their time.
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.
Let's make movies, not deals. Let's write movies, not scripts.
Sometimes you like the personal adventure implicit in the making of a film, and sometimes you like your part in a film, and sometimes you like the final result.
I had written a script called 'Freed,' which I had wanted to direct.
We mystify the art of moviemaking, but it's not amystical science. You take a good screenplay, put a group togetherand you hammer it out.
If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.
You can't get a movie made without a script; it's the blueprint to your building.
Cinema is a thankless industry where sometimes to appear on the cinematic scenery is a thing for late bloomers and people who are very patient. The places are accounted, and the space is often unwelcoming. Money is rare, and independent voices are muted by the almost complete absence of risk takers.
I find the most interesting and most daring scripts tend to be for independent films.
When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism.
I'm an actor's director.
A script is just a script. A good script can be a bad movie, so easily. It's the process that makes it good. You need a good script, don't get me wrong, but you need all those other things to make a good movie. You really do.
I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. It's all bullshit.
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.
I don't think film is the writer's medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it.
I'm good with a script.
I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.
If you've ever wondered why some writers who, in your humble opinion, don't write as well as you do yet are rich and famous while you struggle onward, this is the reason. They are great directors.