Vetrimaaran Quotes

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.

Adapting a book is the most difficult thing because half the time you are wondering what to remove.

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

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.

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.

Adaptation of books is never a success. When the author wants to make it, it's even worse.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

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

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.

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

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

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

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

I am very lucky: not very many writers can say they genuinely like the film of their book. However, I do.

I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.

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.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

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

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.

It's hard sometimes, especially with a book like 'Scorch Trials,' to truly adapt to the way the book is because so many of the scenes that take place in the book are really graphed and painted for the imagination. Trying to bring that to life is a really big task.

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