Literary Source Material Quotes

A film based on a jolly good John Grisham book is fine, but I like to get a bit under the skin.

The world may not be ready yet for the film equivalent of books on tape, but this peculiar phenomenon has arrived in the form of the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.'

Fox bought the rights to the book way back when, and there was this attempt by Fox to make a movie out of 'The Hot Zone,' and it tended tragically in a Hollywood disaster involving Robert Redford and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott. But the rights have been sitting at Fox ever since.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

I'm not one of those people that goes into the movies that are based off of books going, 'I know what this is really about.' I want to go and have a good time.

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

The phone conversations about a possible TV series of 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' stretch back years, but now that the moment has come, now that I am actually here at Wentworth Woodhouse, I lose my bearings.

When you're lucky enough to have a good film made of your novel - and 'Never Let Me Go' is, believe me, a heartbreakingly good film indeed - you get wonderfully talented individuals each focusing on their special area.

I read that book, 'Lonesome Dove,' and I told my agent that they were gonna make a miniseries out of it and I wanted to be in it. I didn't care what part.

'Carrie' was a pretty big-budget movie at a real studio, with a director that had already done a bunch of things and had some notoriety, and Stephen King was the writer.

When a movie based on a book comes out, people always say that the book is always better than the movie. So I'm always interested in reading the book, too.

Whenever you take a general meeting, inevitably you run out of things to talk about, they'd always say, 'What's your dream project?' I would always pull out 'Gerald's Game.' If they knew the book, they'd say, 'Well, that's unfilmable.' If they didn't know the book it would take about 30 seconds of my pitch to say, 'That's not a movie.'

The one that I've always wanted - and I have Scott Rudin in my way blocking it - is 'Blood Meridian,' which Cormac McCarthy has offered to adapt into a screenplay.

Often I would get offers to remake films and that didn't interest me. I have no interest in remaking a film in Hindi which has been made in the south already. I prefer adapting from a book than a movie.

I wrote my first play because I wanted to try directing something, and I couldn't afford the rights - it was an adaptation of a book called 'The Wave' by Morton Rhue.