Robert Downey Jr. Quotes

A good script and perfect casting, that's 90 percent of the work.

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

I spent a long time working in the movies to figure out that kind of acting and also how to write and produce for the screen.

I get a script and it's really interesting with scripts, because you never really know. It's paper and it could be great or awful. Even scripts that are good could end up not working.

There are no great scripts - just great films.

With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.

You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.

We all write, but the script is a blueprint. We can lose whole scenes when we're shooting.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

'Underworld' was my first filmed book. I think there are about seven of my lines in it.

You can't make a good movie with a bad script, no matter who's involved.

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

If the script is not good, the film will not work.

As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I'm curious to see how it translates.

I would love to do a commercial film. But my hero is the script.

With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.

'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.

I'm not saying I'm a writer, but I've been in movies for a long time, and I think I could write a script for a movie.

There are definitely reasons to do certain things, but I like to stick to good director, good actor, good script.

It's a whole other way of working when you work in films: You know exactly the arc of your character.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.

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.

Directing is not on my agenda, but writing is. I want to write everything from action, superhero films to quiet dramas, smaller films.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.