John Dunne Quotes

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.

I guess you go back to the old writer's adage that when they do your stuff in Hollywood, you smile sweetly upon your credit - if there is one - and enjoy the show.

I just want to work on good scripts.

As a writer, you're not even at the party when you work in film. At best, you're the one laying out the canapes.

I usually just do, like, studio jobs, re-writes and stuff.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

I got it into my head that I was going to be starring in movies that I wrote, so that's what I did. I stopped acting in all things, and I wrote my first script, which was optioned a week after I finished it.

I started acting when I was really young. I knew I wanted to be in the industry in other ways. I knew that I wanted to do more than just act. I don't know that I knew it was screenwriting, but I just knew that I wanted to be involved.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

The reason I wanted to start directing is that as an actor I felt I came into a job late. There's a whole team of people who have been working on it for months before you start. You have this really intense period of filming and then you leave it, knowing that the director will work on it for another few months.

I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

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.

When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

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.

I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.

I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.

I want to get off with the screenwriting.

After 'Divergent,' I got a job rewriting a sci-fi script at Paramount. I think they really liked what I did, so I got a call saying, 'We're about to shoot 'Ninja Turtles' in three or four months; do you wanna come in and do a little work on the script?' That was the beginning of a many-month 'Ninja Turtle' odyssey.

In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it.

The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

As a screenwriter, you have to let go, and you have to hand your baby over and let it go off into the world, which is entirely appropriate.

Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.