Harvey Pekar Quotes

To get the film in your head on the screen, first you have to take it out of your head and explain it to everyone who is working with you. This will take work and planning.

I have always meticulously storyboarded my films from beginning to end.

I got involved in script development from the beginning. It was nice to see how a film gets made right from the beginning. It was quite hands-on for me.

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.

I structure the scripts and work on them on films and work on scenes with writers and but I haven't written a script myself, I really respect what they do and I'm fortunate I get to work with people that I really enjoy working with and we all kind of spitball and work together on these things, but I haven't written a script yet.

As I got farther and farther along in the series I did less and less preparation. I didn't use outlines or sketches. I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to tell and then the dialogue just came to me as I was inking the page.

To this day I over prepare. I draw storyboards for every scene - chicken scratches so crude that they amuse and horrify the crew. I send out shot lists, act out the scenes, and search for a theme that I can relate to. It's my favorite time of the process.

I think the best collaborations in comics come from a lot of talks with the artists where you are finding out what they want to draw, what kind of villains they want to do.

I don't do storyboarding, ever; I'm not interested in that.

When I'm writing a movie, it's usually pretty close to what the movie is going to be, which is just a luxury of being a writer-director.

I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.

One of the main things I do is focus on ideas and what stories we decide to tell, but probably the biggest part of my job I'd say is working on the storyboards.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

We would write scripts, like for 'Shutterbugs.' Then when we shot it, everyone just came up with new stuff. We've definitely learned how to do it better as we've gotten along. So basically, that's how it went. We just go in with ideas and try to figure out funny stuff while we're there.

Nelson McCormack on 'Killing Kennedy' was really terrific because I wrote the script, and he had some terrific ideas. We went over the script together, and I was with him on set. So it was a collaborative effort.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

We did have a script, but it didn't consist of the routines and gags. It outlined the basic story idea and just a plan for us to follow. But when it came to each scene, we and the gagmen would work out ideas.

A lot of directors will do a certain amount of storyboarding and pre-vis, and yet when they get on the set, everything starts to change, and they have new ideas.

I really don't storyboard unless it's an action sequence of some kind, but I plan carefully.

When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.

I actually think storyboards are great. I don't draw well enough to do them myself. I've only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in 'Margaret': one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.