Andrea Arnold Quotes

Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it's always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it's not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.

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.

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.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to 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.

It's hard to see a film that's been made from a book that you really loved because it's such a different experience.

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.

Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'

I mean, there are things in the book you could never do in a movie.

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

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?'

Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?

Sometimes we'll walk into a set, and I'll think, 'Oh, this film doesn't look like this.' You know, 'cause I read the script, and I saw it in my head in some other way. Which is a lot like what happens when they're writing a movie that's based on a book - I'm like, 'Ah! He doesn't have a beard.' You have these visions in your head about it.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.

When you read the book, you paint the picture but when you adapt a book then the audience will, by and large, say the book was better and every filmmaker knows this.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

I've just had the opportunity to see the finished film of 'The Hunger Games.' I'm really happy with how it turned out. I feel like the book and the film are individual yet complementary pieces that enhance one another.

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!

I'm not sure my books would translate into movies very easily. So rather than have someone do a terrible job, I haven't been willing to sell them.

I think it's counterproductive for actors to come to the set with well-thumbed copies of the book their film is adapted from.

You know how when you read a book and it becomes a movie, and it's different than you pictured? In some ways, acting is a lot like that.

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'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.

'A Storm of Swords' is a massive volume, and it seemed like it would be shortchanging it to try to cram it into ten episodes.