Plot Condensation Quotes

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original... You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving.

It's hard when you make a film from a book that so many people love, because there's no way to get the entire story into a two-hour movie. But I was pleased with the reaction [for Kite Runner].

As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so that the viewer does not become bewildered.

What you hear mostly people gripe about adaptations is, 'They took out this scene,' or, 'They had to condense these characters.' I understand why they have to do that. But if you had a favorite character, and now they've been melded together with another one, it's disappointing.

Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.

When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.

'A Storm of Swords' is a massive volume, and it seemed like it would be shortchanging it to try to cram it into ten episodes.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.