Script Rewrite Quotes

I think one of the worst notes I think I've ever received was Ang Lee on 'Brokeback Mountain.' He came in on coverage, and he was like, 'More, more handsome.' I was like, 'I'll try that.'

There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.

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.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer will turn in a script and never be heard from again.

I can only get to a certain point as I write and then I have individual conversations with everyone that I cast. I always do a rewrite based on the conversations.

When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent.

I don't know how much credit I can take for 'Walker, Texas Ranger,' because I only worked on it for three weeks. I re-wrote the pilot, and then my name was on it forever.

I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.

I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.

'Sleepless' was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.

When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.

So you have to keep waiting and then they give you the script and it's terrible. Then you have to go to the rewrite and they're very upset because you didn't like it. I went through that for seven years.

During script narrations, if I feel the screenplay mood jumping abruptly, I tell the director, and they work on it.

'Cars' has been a godsend. I mean, I get paid to talk into a mic. Honestly, I had no idea it would become as big as it did. When I first got the part of Mater, it was actually a small part. I did the voicing for it, though, and the animators liked it so much they rewrote the original script so that Mater could be in it more.

When they offered me 'Wayne's World 2,' they said: 'We were going to give this to another actor, then we thought we'd see you'. I just thought: 'Surely you always had me in mind for that just in the way that it's written?', but they never admitted it. It was a wonderful gig to do. Really special.

I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.

To me, the screenplay only becomes the Bible of the film after the actors have been cast. You go over the initial script with them and listen to the way they talk. Then you try to do a rewrite to accommodate them.

Fox was interested in a different title to 'Independence Day.'

You hit the wall almost right when you get up to the top. If there's a female writer being suggested to do a rewrite on a script, it's always the big boys going, "Mm, let's go with [a man]..."