Terry Teachout Quotes

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

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.

Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.

Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos.

I think that what we were doing with the live musical version of 'Shrek' was taking the ideas and the structure of the movie and not necessarily reinventing it but reimagining it. It is a very different medium to perform.

No, we've been performing our old songs a little differently each performance.

Let's just say that I don't think our show has very much in common with the book any more.

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

All I can say is that I am not one of those writers who want 100% of their book in the film. I recognize that film is a different medium and the filmmaker must have the right to bring some new elements to the table, provided the soul of the book is preserved.

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!

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

When doing a remake, you're on safer territory. You know you cannot go absolutely wrong. But how right it goes depends on various factors like casting and the way you adapt the film.

I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

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.

Any director who comes into a revival owes a great deal to the original director. If I know the backbone works, it gives me, as a director, much more freedom to bring something new to it or try something different.

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 guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.

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

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.