Julian Fellowes Quotes

Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.

The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.

As far as 'Birdsong' is concerned, I think the television program made a very honorable attempt at it, but the truth of the matter is that adaptations of long, ambitious books very seldom transfer well to the screen, and why would they?

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Dreamland is a book, but it's my song in book form. It's translated itself into a different medium.

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

As an author, it's a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It's tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.

To make a successful film from a successful play is probably much more difficult than making one from scratch, just as any carpenter will tell you that it is more difficult to restore an old house than to build a comparable new one.

If you're going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit and that you want to hit.

Any time you take a movie to stage, you can't do the same thing; it's not gonna work.

I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

I don't like to use the word 'remake', I think reinterpretation is a better word. It's just a matter of respecting the source, and then trying to make your own film, and trying not to be inhibited by being so beholden to every single thing... We respect the source, but we make changes to it.

Not everybody can do the comic book adaptation thing and make it believable. It is challenging.

It is impossible to do a movie exactly the way a comic book is written and drawn, just as it's impossible to do a movie exactly like a novel or exactly like anything else. When you go to different forms of media, you have to adapt.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

I think any musical has so many moving parts and the challenge is unifying all the moving parts in particular because you have the camera and now it's all about adaptation and what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in another so the challenge is to stay as true as you can to the material and yet not be afraid to step out of it and add elements to make it satisfying cinematically.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Of course, every actor has their box and you have to respect and play for it, but I do love challenging myself. I love every role to be new, and I always like to bring a freshness to every character I play.

A movie's very different from the book, and it's different from the script, and it's usually one person's vision.

I love playing a villain. I think that there's something freeing about that, and it's a different kind of challenge. More than anything, for me as an actor, it's about challenging myself and doing as many different things as I can.

As artists, it’s our job to delve into the uncomfortable, the difficult and the challenging.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

I think every once in a while I feel the need to break my medium... if I have been doing a very large painting I like to drop into something in small scale. It is a challenge to go into this size. It is just to hold my own interest, and then each media has its own conditions.