movie potential Quotes

To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.

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.

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could've been good. There's an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can't, it doesn't matter how skilful you are.

A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

Obviously, SNL has a lot of viewers, but the potential for a movie is through the roof.

I think 'Green Lantern' has the potential to be a very highly regarded superhero movie. We're approaching it with such respect and such care.

In one way they make the movie something you can handle because it's character driven and it's slightly off center. That's what's attractive, but it also has the potential of being cutesy and sappy. I am so uninterested in that.

I've never known a situation in my career where a terrible script turned into a movie that was out of this world or was a success.

I wouldn't do the movie unless I thought it had a chance to be good.

When you think of all the things that have happened, since that problem with computers in 2000 and everybody was afraid and they were buying water, imagine what Millennium would do with all the things that are going on in the world right now. It has the capacity to be a movie. But, anyway, I loved doing it. It changed my life because the guy that I was playing was so much more educated and smarter than I was, so I had to live up to it.

The way I pick movies is, first, if the script is any good. Then, if the script is good, who else is in it, the director, the producer, all that. If you have all that, there's a chance the movie will be great. If the script isn't right, or the director or cast isn't right, you've got no shot in hell.

I was desperately unhappy with it [Blade Runner]. I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis. The final version was something that I was completely unhappy with. The movie obviously has a very strong following, but it could have been more than a cult picture.