Script Changes Quotes

We've had no problems with the actors, but we keep a really loose set.

'Writing' is the wrong way to describe what happens to words in a movie. First, you put down words. Then you rehearse them with actors. Then you shoot the words. Then you edit them. You cut a lot of them, you fudge them, you make up new ones in voice-over. Then you cut it and throw it all away.

With television, sometimes the writing is continuous and happening at every moment, and you'll get new pages at the last moment. We have to incorporate that into what it is that we're doing.

So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

Things can change on a daily basis in television. You can be introduced to aspects of your character that you had no idea existed because they didn't exist a week before. The next week it might be taken away from you in some way that you can't control.

George [Lucas] wanted to know whether we'd be interested. He did say that if we didn't want to do it, they wouldn't cast another actor in our parts - they would write us out.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

I was fascinated with the writing process and seeing the evolution of a sketch and how it would change up to the minute before it went on the air.

The part in 'Taxi' was originally written for a guy named Phil Ryan, so they made it Phil Banta, and then they made it Tony Banta, which sounded a lot better anyway.

I didn't want 'BSG' to have to rewrite Anders as a sniveling, whining ball of despair who's hiding out in the corner.

Shooting in Hong Kong, you can do whatever you want, even change the script every day. In Hollywood, you have to have a lot of meetings.

Of course I would change anything if John Cassavetes said so - it's his script. But he was very easy about that.

It is hard work composing a song for a film and showing it to makers: 50% of the tune remains the same, and the remaining 50% is changed to suit the script.

Script is not finished until it's finished. There's many times, partway through a film, when an idea comes, and I say, "How beautiful this is. This thing was not complete and look what's happened, look what's come along." And it just came along at what might be called a strange time rather than a normal time.

Once a film gets into production, the actors sometimes begin to have more input than a writer does.

We used to take two years to complete a film, and sometimes, we used to be told on the sets that the scenes are still being written. Everything today is pre-planned.

In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That's not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It's a different point in both our lives.

When you're tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers, so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I think it's a bad habit for an actor to change scripts because that's not your job. You're not a writer, necessarily - although there are some actors that are good at it.

I tried to buy the script of 'Hancock.' I loved it. The script was far darker and edgier than the movie.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

I mean one of the weird things about TV and one of the things that some actors don't like but I kind of dig is that you never know where you're headed, I mean you never know what the writer might think of next.