Julian Barratt Quotes

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.

I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

I've never adapted a book I didn't love.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

When a movie is being made out of a book, there is a mixed reaction on the part of fans because they are both extremely excited and they are also terrified. 'They are going to take my story, and they are going to mess it up; they are going to ruin it; they're going to do this; they're going to do that.'

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.

An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

I recently watched Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, and it wasn't a favorite film. Then I saw the one that was made in 1990, which in my opinion didn't match up to the original.

I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.