Abel Ferrara Quotes

I love writing for the screen.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

It's hard writing screenplays.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don't really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.

'The Full Monty' was my first feature script, and I wasn't that skilled at it.

I went to journalism school, so sometimes writing the script of 'Being Mary Jane' is me putting my journalism hat on.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.

I've done a lot of ad films where an idea can be translated in 30 or 40 seconds. But in a movie, an idea needs to be stretched for two hours, and requires you to draw a bit from your experiences in life.

I'd love to do writing for Hollywood.

It seems to me the big weakness in most films is the writing. You can learn directing, but you can't learn writing.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

A good script makes our job a lot easier.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.