Scriptwriting Process Quotes

It's very, very rare in this business [moviemaking] where a script lands on your lap ready to go.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

The ideal time for writing a [television] script is four days, though sometimes it has to be two or three days depending on the deadline. If it's two days, sometimes there are things I see that don't work as well. If I have two weeks, the scripts get kind of flabby and lack the adrenaline that a sense of deadline fills you with.

A lot of times, the script is the thing they care about least.

I love working on scripts. I love coming up with ideas about what people would dress like or talk like. I love all that.

We've done things that are faster at times, but it's definitely different when we direct all the episodes because it's like we have to write them all, then shoot them all, then edit them all. So we have to just get ahead on those scripts basically.

Usually, the biggest hang-up is the script. You could have a script done in six months that you love, or it could be like The Fantastic Four it's been almost 10 years.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.

Actors don't request what scenes to be written in. That's just not how it works.

I've written about 15 screenplays and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches.

Plays are the marathon of scriptwriting. You fix on a point somewhere in the middle distance, and you start running, and you don't stop until you get to the end. The theory is that you have something you cannot not say: this is the engine that propels you through to the last page.

When I was writing the script I thought he is this guy. I really hoped...I kept imagining him as that guy. And then he came in to audition and I was really nervous because I really wanted him to do Greek, you know? And he...I didn't know who else I could cast. And he was amazing in the audition. Really funny.

Highland has changed my entire way of working with scripts. I use it every day.

I think it's really hard for filmmakers to adapt books.

When I'm writing a script, before I can write dialogue or anything, I have two or three hundred pages of notes, which takes me a year. So, it's not like "what happens next." I've got things that I'm thinking about but I don't settle on them. And if I try to write dialogue before then, I can't. It's just garbage.

'Warm Bodies' was a more long-term thing; I had to write the script, who knew if it was every really going to happen, if I'd find the right actors, and so on, so I grabbed '50/50' because I just fell in love with it.

The other great thing about it, that seems to be the case in streaming, is that a lot more scripts are written before you start. Because they are planning on allowing it all up at one time, you have four or five scripts to read and an outline of where it's going to go. The writers aren't chasing their tails as much. You're able to see the beginning, middle and end of a storyline, and that is rare. Streaming allows that, in a way that network TV doesn't.

It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying 'I don't really love this,' we discuss it for 15 minutes.

I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically.

When I talk to Ryan Murphy or Ali Adler about my past or things in my personal life, occasionally pieces of that will end up in the script, and I think that's true of everybody. It's true of that entire writer's room, certainly of Ryan and Ali. I think that he writes really well for actors, for his actors, and he writes to their strengths. I always feel very well taken care of with him.

If you work in the studio system in America, they've almost got to the point where a computer programme could write scripts. Effectively, they hire and fire enough writers until they get something generic.

It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That’s the faith you have to have.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

I know a lot of directors have a whole staff of people trying to find their next film for them. I always just end up writing mine.