David Benioff Quotes

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

Making comic adaptations means making a lot of choices - you need to adjust the pacing, the dialogue, and in this case, a lot of the cultural references.

The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

I couldn't enjoy 'A Dance With Dragons,' unfortunately. Of course, I enjoyed it, but it was the first of the books I read as a writer on 'Game of Thrones,' so all I could do is think, 'We're going to have to shift that,' 'We won't be able to afford that,' or 'That's a great scene.'

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

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.

We set ourselves a limit and cut characters which weren't so vital.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.

If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.

Usually, when I read something, I'm looking for the story first. And then, when I re-read it, I check every part of it to see whether every scene is necessary. You imagine yourself watching the movie, to see whether or not you're losing the through-line of the story.

If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

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.

If you're going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit and that you want to hit.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

Adapting a book is the most difficult thing because half the time you are wondering what to remove.

I think you only need 2-3 good scenes in a film.