Mike Flanagan Quotes

There's so often - in filmmaking, you're backed into something that already has these set parameters, whether it's a sequel or a book that people love.

Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

What I will say - one thing that is attractive about getting a real film made within the studio system is that studio systems, with their marketing and distribution, have real power.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

All I can say is that I am not one of those writers who want 100% of their book in the film. I recognize that film is a different medium and the filmmaker must have the right to bring some new elements to the table, provided the soul of the book is preserved.

Particularly when you're making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives - you know?

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

Some things that work in a comic don't work in a film, and vice versa.

It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.

When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

In any adaptation, the challenge is to take the essence of the original source of the material, be faithful to it to a point, but to also recognize that you're telling a story in a very different medium. It has to exist on its own, and it has to offer something unique to that experience.

Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

The business of taking a book and transforming into a script to make this thing called a film - it's a mysterious process to me; sometimes it works.