Michael Arndt Quotes

I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.

I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

I think I would have a better time writing films rather than directing.

I wrote 'Mud' for Matthew McConaughey and had never met him.

I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.

Usually when I write a movie, I'm lucky if I get one good actress.

Most of the films that I've written, made in my life, I've written. Not all, but most I would say.

I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn't very easy for anybody. He's made it successful on top of that.

All of a sudden Mindy [Kaling] was writing on The Office and had sold a TV show. When we'd try to write shows, we'd jokingly call the word documents "Hit Show." We just couldn't crack the code.

Now that I've got a way in [to the industry] - because it can feel a bit like, "How can I possibly write a film?" - but now that I've got at least some experience in the film world, I'd absolutely love to do it again.

I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.

I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."

I have no desire to write anything for screen. That's a great talent.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

I like writing for other people. I love it. It's great because you write it and then you hand it off to someone else. But in terms of directing, anything I direct will be something I've written or re-written. I'm in no crazy rush to direct.

You can't get a movie made without a script; it's the blueprint to your building.

I prefer writing for myself to perform, I guess. But if I had to choose, I'd rather perform in someone's movie than write a movie for someone else.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

Writing is like that. You have to have some basic creative spark, and then, if you have that, I feel like you can learn the production side of it. You can learn how to be a good producer. And I guess it does take a certain balance of those two skills in your head to be a successful showrunner.