Joseph Kosinski Quotes

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

My husband and I are writers, and I wish I could write faster. There are not a lot of movies made with black actors in mind.

Getting movies developed doesn't do me any good as a producer. It only does me good to get movies made.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

'Analyze This' is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing. I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense.

For me, it's important that the script is good. Then a good director will want to make it.

I would love to have more original material developed. 'Pacific Rim' has made that slightly more possible.

To sit down at a computer every day and write a script is commendable. I don't have the patience for it, but I have some fantastic ideas.

Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

I love the idea of directing, I'm not confident enough, but I'm more confident in, well, I'd love to write. I've sort of written my whole life and I think I have a knack for it, so I'd like to write something and see what people think and that would be my first step to directing.

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing.

The logic for me, in writing it is that the different areas or different years are almost like different rooms.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

The first person I met in the business was David Heyman, who was a producer on Daytrippers and who went on to produce the highly-unsuccessful Harry Potter series.

I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

I don't think writing stops until the film is out. In the edit, it's another draft. [The script] is the food for set, and then the set is food for the edit, and the edit is food for the screen. It's constant, and this is just the first stage of it.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

The only thing I might have noticed [and this is pretty anecdotal] is that there is some tendency to need to be taught that 'writing is rewriting' - maybe more of a sense than was pervasive 10 years ago that the first or second pass of a story is sufficient. That is an idea that is easily dislodged, but I suspect it might have something to do with the turnaround time re: blogging and so on - this sense that there is some essential truth about a first draft that one runs the risk of "ruining" by coming back to it.

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.

When I'm writing in my bedroom, in a bar, at my kitchen table or wherever, I'm conjuring it all up on the page. That's all well and good, but it is going to be a limited perspective at that point and time. Occasionally, what I write might read really well initially, but then you change your mind while hunting for locations when you discover settings which offer even better opportunities for drama or dramatic staging.

I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.