Adaptations Quotes

I'm one of those who can't read the books after they've seen the movie.

I love 'South Pacific.' It's got beautiful music. But there have been so many, you know, renditions of this in high school or college productions.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.

I think there's a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, 'The kids love this!'

I'm not really a sequel guy. I did 'Angels & Demons' after 'The Da Vinci Code,' because I like working with Hanks, and I felt it was a really different sort of world that we were visiting. That was, of itself, interesting.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.

If you ask me, I would love to see works like Sharat Chandra Chatterjee's 'Badi Didi,' Munshi Premchand's 'Nirmala,' and Phanishwar Nath Renu's 'Maila Anchal' come alive on small screen.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

There are a lot of movies that I don't care about, especially not remakes.

There are two 'Snow White' movies coming out for the same reason that you remember back in the day there was 'Armageddon' and then 'Deep Impact.' You know, 'Andromeda Strain' and then 'Outbreak.' Like, all of those things. It's common because basically studios have no imagination in making the decisions.

I'm a Stephen King fanatic.

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.

I like to think of my books and the movies of my books living in two separate universes. Each is very nice, but only one is correct - the book. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the other versions, and I always do.

I had left 'Ragtime' - and 'Ragtime' was a completely different beast, no pun intended, than 'The Lion King'.

There are so many YA novels being made because there is so much young talent that can bring it to life. J-Law was one of the first females to do it with 'The Hunger Games,' and it's been going on for a while now. With J-Law, it was like, 'Hey, I'm Katniss,' and then, 'Hey, I just won an Oscar!'

I wish I had come along when the studios were making those big musical pictures. It would be great to do re-makes of some of the old ones like 'Porgy and Bess' or 'Showboat.' I'd love to do 'em.

There are perennial stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Sherlock Holmes' and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and 'Frankenstein' is another one. They're perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years, and that's OK.

Over the last 20 years, everyone who interviews me feels compelled to ask at least one question about 'The Island of Dr. Moreau.'

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

I was attached to 'Sharp Objects' before 'Big Little Lies,' actually.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

Any consideration of the story we call 'Cinderella' for simplicity's sake must acknowledge that 'Cinderella' has had a dizzying array of personae over hundreds of years, in several cultures. There is no one authoritative tale of 'Cinderella,' only a hall of mirrors with a different face in each reflection.