Screen Adaptation Quotes

Television tends to be a more difficult medium for me to get my head around sometimes when it comes to certain things I get offered.

Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

'Fences' is under the headline of the project of my lifetime. It is the most perfect and undeniably developed narrative that I've ever worked on.

I don't think anyone has ever succeeded in putting Ian Fleming's James Bond up on the screen. The closest in my opinion is Pierce Brosnan.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

Lots of movies don't kind of work as well as they do on the page.

Most of the time, I don't think movies of TV shows are a great idea. It's worked a few times, but usually, I think that what's on TV works on TV.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

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.

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.

'Peter Pan' is a beloved property. It's a property that was brought to the screen many, many times before, so one has to not only justify the reasons why one might make a 'Peter Pan' movie in 2018, 2019 or whatever, but you also have to do justice to the source material.

I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.

Graphic novel genre become really quite popular. It's really a big screen film genre that they have successfully moved into the small screen.

Like most writers, I sit in a room and scribble a story and you don't have a connection with the people who take your story, whether it be to the stage or to the screen.

The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

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

I really like the "two is better than three" line. People ask me is this drama or comedy? I just think the more colors you have to a film the better. The more genres, the more people will like it. I like relating to the whole general speaking public. The script itself is 99 pages but the novel it is based on is 600. I had to leave a lot of stuff out of the script. I had a limitation of what I could present on the big screen.

You know, that's the reality, but I always shoot movies for the screen, because that's just the experience that I want to get out of it.

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

But what I've also really liked about it is that it not only has Marvel set about... if they just were slavishly trying to bring the comic books to life, literally, I don't the movies would work, because it's different to see something on screen in three dimensions with actors, and they kind of, I believe, are constantly trying to find a way to absolutely respect the source material and at the same time, transform it into something that works and that you believe on screen.

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

I'm not in the business of adapting things that are popular for the sake of just getting it on the screen. I think there has to be a vital reason.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

I'm in a constant conflict about having to make a movie for the big and the small screen at the same time, stylistically. So I just basically make it for the large screen.