Evan Daugherty Quotes

I always feel like a script is a recipe, and then you bring the elements into the recipe, and you cook with it.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.

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.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

I went to journalism school, so sometimes writing the script of 'Being Mary Jane' is me putting my journalism hat on.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

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.

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not all about temperament.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

The success of the movie industry comes from the story. And the story comes from somebody putting something down on paper.

I can't separate the process of writing from the visual process. I'm speaking only for myself here, but I'm a highly visual writer. In my imagination, when I'm thinking of a scene, I think of every last detail of it: The space, the color palette, the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

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.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

When the script is finished, and you're sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you've written, and you're hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.

I've never written anything that I haven't wanted to write again. I want to, and still am, writing 'A Few Good Men' again. I didn't know what I was doing then, and I'm still trying to get it right. I would write 'The Social Network' again if they would let me, I'd write 'Moneyball' again. I would write 'The West Wing' again.

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.