Brian Michael Bendis Quotes

I don't have a favorite process. My favorite process is the right process for the person I am working with. I can fit in any process as long as the director respects who I am and doesn't try to put me in a situation to get something out of me - if I can give it without that situation.

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

I basically put myself into directors' hands and let them tell me what to do, and the more they told me what to do, the more I liked it.

Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'

In our case, we have no script. So the only people we can work with are people who have been working with us in the past, and they know we are going to do something; it's kind of a trust.

When I meet a good actor, I would like to be a director. When I meet a good director, I would like to be an actor. When there is a good script, I would like to be both a director and an actor. The switch is very natural, not intentional.

I try not to put myself in a box, so I'll write with anybody who wants to. I don't put limitations on my co-writes.

I don't worry about collaborating. Whatever happens, happens.

I believe in, 'I do it my way, and you do it your way, and then see what works' pattern. I think that comes with me having worked as an assistant director earlier, which I really enjoyed.

I don't believe in closed scripts; I think that they should be open.

I got called and was told, "We'd like you to do The Hobbit", which was my favorite of all of them when I was a kid - "And we want you to play a character that's not in the books", I gulped and hesitated, but then I went, "These guys know this world, and they represent this world so well, that I actually think they've earned the right to have a little play."

I don't need to try to push everyone out of the way and say, "This is how you do it. I actually like not knowing. I trust every lead.

Don't be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable.

If I really want to do something, I'll go in and do whatever the director feels that he needs me to do.

When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

I had complete freedom. They [Netflix] knew roughly what I was doing.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

I aspire to be an instrument of the director. I'm happiest like that. The stronger the director, the more I'm willing to give them. It's not just about admiration for their films, it's how they deal with you, and whether they get you or the way you work. If they don't, you better adjust your way of working to suit them. I want to work with people who are good at what they do, and people who are passionate. As you get older, you suffer fools less easily. That's why there's all those cranky character actors. I'm an exception. I'm a sweetheart.

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.

A good leader needs to know how to follow.

Now, I'm simply working with people I want to work with. I just want to have good working experiences and let the dice fall where they may.

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.