Kate Atkinson Quotes

I love producing. My dream as a producer is to be able to build a company that can be a safe haven for artists, for directors and for writers and actors to do what they do best and let them have final edit. I'd like to build something to that effect.

It's ludicrous to think people work for you: 'a film by...' doesn't exist. Directed by, maybe, but it's a film from a collective, a group of people whom you consult and seek your counsel and advice and vice versa, too.

Control is the wrong word. The practice is very much about sharing, and, in any creative practice, some individuals, whether partners or directors, are much closer to certain projects than I could ever be.

In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.

Being able to make work - if it's on your terms, and it's a good fit with the people who are supporting it - can be a very interesting exercise. When it doesn't work is when an artist just connects with a brand, and they try to take advantage of each other.

I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.

The great thing about movies is that they're collaborative. And the worst thing is that they're collaborative.

The vision people have of a director is completely flawed - someone with a crystalline vision of everything they're going to do. How boring would that be? It's a creative and collaborative process.

I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

With movies and TV, storytelling, it's a different medium. I really love it, but I'm one part of many, many pieces of that puzzle and a lot of it is out of my control.

It's an all-inclusive package, when you get to be creative and run a little country while you're on a set and doing it with people that you enjoy working with and you all have a say in it.

I discovered very soon, especially for movies, because I started in theater, that every director has his own universe. You have to be free enough to try to understand what he wants from you. Especially when that director has a tremendous personality. And I'm talking about people like Pedro Almodovar and Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen. And you have to adapt. If you don't adapt to them, you are off the thing.

I found collaboration to be a terrible thing in Hollywood because there are so many people involved you have to make a thousand little compromises to every project and every single scene is a committee decision. It's maddening. But with comics you've got an artist and you've got a writer.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

It's not the norm when creators have any protections with regards to creative control. And so it took some time, I think, for the strip to gain enough popularity where I had enough leverage to come in and say, "It has to be done in a certain way or it's not going to be done at all," and then have people willing to put up with that who were ultimately paying for it. You know, for them to be willing to kind of concede those kind of things. It just takes time, you know?

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock

I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."

If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.

I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.

I love working that way, and that's sort of the way that Mark, Jay, and I have been working for years, where we start with scripts that are really solid and well-written. But once we get into the scene and we start doing the work, we definitely loosen things up.

Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you're creating and writing it, or sometimes you're writing and directing it, or other times you're there from the very beginning.

Movies are grander, with (in my experience) more heavy weight chefs in the kitchen: the studio, the producers, the writers. All of them get to weigh in and you have to listen to all of them because they hired you. With TV, it's a way smaller scale, with only a few people weighing in.

With a film you go with the script that's already written. And I've never thought of a project, a film that would come from my own desire. I don't think I can do it. I need someone else's desire to be able to do something. With a record, it is completely different, it's a collaboration with another artist, but I'm willing to go into intimate places with no masks on.

A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it.