Jess Walter Quotes

I've had nine of my books adapted to film, and almost all were enjoyable. I've been very lucky with Hollywood, and look forward to more movies being adapted. But I don't get involved in that process. I know nothing about making movies and I stay away from it and hope for the best.

There's no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. It's all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.

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.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

Most screenplays I receive are boring, and some are straight-out bad.

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man's Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

I definitely want to do more movies, and I'm also a writer, so I have a few screenplays that I'm working on, one of them based off my one-woman show that I used to do in New York. Two of the screenplays I've written by myself, and then I'm also working on one with my writing partner, Tom Riley, who's in London.

People said that 'Fight Club' would be impossible to turn into a movie, but I think David Fincher loved that challenge.

I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'

I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.

'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.

I think we sublimated our Broadway desires by doing theater in Hollywood - not on stage but by doing the movies of 'Chicago' and 'Hairspray' and also musicals on TV. We did Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella' and 'Gypsy' and 'Annie.' Even 'Smash' was like doing theater.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

I think screenwriter Steve Kloves does such a difficult job. And he does a bloody brilliant job, too. Transferring these Harry Potter books into films and making them coherent is one thing. But making them entertaining, as well, is quite another... He does a tremendous job, and he gets a lot of stick. And it's really unfair sometimes, and I challenge anyone else to do the job he does.

David Mamet, Tim Kazurinsky, and Denise DeClue, who adapted [ About Last Night]. Between the three of them... I mean, it's always down to the writing. You're only as good as your writing.

Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write.

Anytime you take a book and make it into a movie, you're going to have people who have their version of it in their minds and whatnot. You can't please everybody.

I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.

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.

What I do usually is read the book first, for pleasure, to see if my brain starts connecting with it, as a movie. And then, if I say yes, I read it again, only this time I take a pen and, inside the book, I say, "Okay, this is a scene. I don't need this. I'm going to try this. I'm not going to take this." And then, I use that book like a bible and each chapter heading, I write a menu of what's in that chapter, in case I ever need to reference it. And then, I start to outline and write it. I get in there and it starts to evolve, based on having re-read it again.

I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.

I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.