Philip Kitcher Quotes

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

Many people who have watched 'Pieta' have said my filmmaking has become more objective.

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 learned a lot about critics, not to really take them too seriously about movies.

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

Filmmakers often tell me to watch the original version. I never do.

It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film.

One thing I don't do anymore is read or pay attention to the critical response, which is a bummer because when I started, and when I was in school, I loved to read old film criticism.

In 'Blood Work,' they made choices I wouldn't have made, but I'm not a filmmaker. I took the money, and they told the story.

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.

The films you're making have to be faithful to the material.

A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

When I first read the script to 'Black Hawk Down,' I didn't think it was the greatest thing in the world - far from it. But I thought the script at least raised some very important questions that are missing from the final product.

It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.

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 used to obsess on critical reactions to my films, and it's really not a healthy way to live your life, so my new take on it is simply, 'I hope people like it!' I'm not going to be looking at the tomato meter for at least a year! I was very lucky on '50/50' that most critics really liked it.

I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.

I'm a huge Robert Altman fan and don't take issue with his filmmaking, as eccentric as it is. But I just think 'Nashville' was a world he didn't know.

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

I love the novel of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful movie. And they're totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that's kind of the ideal.

Particularly when you're making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives - you know?

I don't read reviews until after I'm done with a production, but when I do finally get to them, I'm always sort of floored by what the bad ones say.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.

Some of our favorite films are obviously not written by the person who directed it. And yet a 'Taxi Driver,' or some Nicholas Ray movie, like 'In a Lonely Place,' seems so personal or obsessive or whatever.