Sean Penn Quotes

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.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.

Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read the book.

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.

Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.

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

When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film.

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

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!

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.

We've seen from shows like 'Game of Thrones' that the book can become a seed, which you plant in the ground of great TV creators, and it can sprout out into a big tree.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

You shouldn't think of these movies as being 'The Lord of the Rings.' The Lord of the Rings is, and always will be, a wonderful book - one of the greatest ever written. Any films will only ever be an INTERPRETATION of the book. In this case my interpretation.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

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.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.

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.

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work.

I think the hardcore fans can expect exactly what both 'The Hunger Games' and 'Catching Fire' delivered: 'Mockingjay' is going to be as faithful a rendition of Suzanne's Collins's world and books and characters as we can put out!

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.