Screenwriting Experience Quotes

The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.

Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

I've been very fortunate with my three spec scripts - which is sort of my thematic trilogy of the American Frontier. With 'Sicario', 'Hell or High Water' and then 'Wind River' - which is the third - there were no rewrites. It was the first draft for all three.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.

I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.