Noah Hathaway Quotes

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

You know, things that might work in a book just do not work in the visual medium of movies.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

As long as they're making beloved books into movies, people are going to be like, 'That's not my mental image of them.' It takes that moment for it to click and become their mental image.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.

I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

The book is even quirkier, but it's hard to bring all of that stuff to a movie. With a book, you use your imagination more and create your own way to make it all make sense.

The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

Yes, I'm happy with Alan Ball's production of my novels.

I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head.