Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes

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

I have always thought if you are going to make a film, it's much better to have an original script that will play to film's strengths.

As a director, you want to work with great writers.

As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I'm curious to see how it translates.

A good script can come from anywhere.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

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

I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

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

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

I would like to write a movie and, if it wasn't too crazy, also direct.

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.

In my films writers are more important than actors.

I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'

My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.

Yeah, I'd love to write a film, that'd be great.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

'Rocky' is an incredibly human story, and 'Creed' is very inspired by the Rocky lore, but there's something kind of profound in letting it all go. This is the first time I'm co-writing, and I'm learning as I go. This process is so different from 'Fruitvale'; hopefully it gets made.

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

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.