Tracy Letts Quotes

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

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.

There's a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.

I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.

Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school - and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college - which was called 'Extras' - I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

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.

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

I am an internationally produced playwright.

The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.

I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.

I write plays, and I have a musical that's starting to get produced now. That's what I would love to do, but it's so hard. The only reason people are reading my plays and musicals is because I'm in movies.

I want to be an author/director and I'm writing my second book now and I want to make a movie of it, and I hope I get to do this for the rest of my life.

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing acting or becoming a mogul. I love writing and directing; I see those two jobs as the most critical in the making of a film.

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.