Derek Cianfrance Quotes

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you're turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

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

When you're lucky enough to have a good film made of your novel - and 'Never Let Me Go' is, believe me, a heartbreakingly good film indeed - you get wonderfully talented individuals each focusing on their special area.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

Polar' is based on the first and a little bit on the second book and all the characters from those novels are in there. The story is based on the graphic novel, but when it came to the execution of the film I felt I couldn't really make a movie without any dialogue.

To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book.

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

Once we start seeing video games that have more memorable characters, you'll see better movie adaptations.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

Ford didn't know what to do with Mister Roberts that wasn't repeating what was successful in New York. He was trying to do things to the play that would be his in the film.

There were many films made for both cinema and television, and in general I don't connect them very much with our books. I have one favorite: 'The Man on the Roof' by director Bo Widerberg, which was based on 'The Abominable Man.'

I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.

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

My wish is to bring my heroes to the big screen, and many of them have already appeared in my films.

Films are always different from books.

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.