Play Adaptation Quotes

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

When I was 17, I rewrote the songs for a musicalized version of 'Love's Labour's Lost.'

The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.

I have been working up until recently with Neil Simon, who has been adapting the character to me.

The End of the Affair is almost like a play.

The first Broadway play I ever saw was 'The Bad Seed' by Maxwell Anderson and with Patty McCormack. 'The Bad Seed' was from an extraordinary novel by William March.

The first play I wrote was called 'Twenty-five.' It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

I called Scott Rudin, and I told him I wanted to do the play [Fences], so that's how the ball got rolling. I never said, "I'll do the play, and the next year I'll do the film, I just wanted to do the play."

'An Inspector Calls' is a British classic, and I am thrilled to be working on this beautiful screen adaptation with Aisling Walsh.

I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I'd love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.

Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.

[Fences] is just a great play to bring to the screen.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

'The Fugitive Kind,' 'Rope,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' - I watched all these as a way of reminding myself that you can do a movie based on a play. You can do a movie that stays in one place for a long stretch.

I was definitely surprised when Talk Radio took off as a play. As a film it has become somewhere between a popular thing and a cult thing.

This outfit called Los Angeles Theatre Works does readings of plays.

'Coriolanus' has been around for 400 years, and it's going to be around for another 400 years, and nothing I can do is going to mess it up. So, going into it, I felt sort of very free to look at it as a filmmaker does.

I came from the theatre, which had given me opportunities in television as well as a film adaptation of my second play 'Daddy's Dyin'... Who's Got The Will?' for MGM.

I did a 20-minute selection of scenes from the play 'Spring Awakening' in college, well before the musical came around, so when the musical was becoming a hot thing, and I was reading interviews with Duncan Sheik about how he came to do the music, I think it's interesting.

I know where I'm supposed to be at the time of the snap. Now, where the play dictates I'm going to go is a different story.

You love for a quarterback to sometimes make the decision as the rush is coming and make the decision as the play, as opposed to where that computer is hitting it fast and he's knowing where to go with the ball at the right time.

I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.

In '57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door.

I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.