Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

House was the first film where I had no influence on the script. I had to buy the script with the game rights.

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

All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

A friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, had the film rights to his book 'Stardust' bought by producer Matthew Vaughn and suggested I adapt it for the screen.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...

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.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

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.

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.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man's Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

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

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

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

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

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

I've had nine of my books adapted to film, and almost all were enjoyable. I've been very lucky with Hollywood, and look forward to more movies being adapted. But I don't get involved in that process. I know nothing about making movies and I stay away from it and hope for the best.

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.

The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.

My Writers Guild of America card is one of my proudest possessions. I was given it after being invited to write the script for a film of my last novel, 'Me Before You,' which is being made by MGM. Whenever I look at it, I think, 'I'm a Hollywood writer!'