Stan Lee Quotes

If you're going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit and that you want to hit.

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

I've been a fan of movies longer than anything else. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can't translate a book literally to the screen. It won't work because it's a different medium. And it would be the same in reverse.

Sometimes what works in a book is too "in your face" when converted to the big screen and sound.

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.

It's tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

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've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

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

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.

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head.

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.

When I first watched 'Coraline,' I thought, 'If that ever got adapted...' If it was done by real actors, I think that would be a really fun thing to do, just because it's a kind of whole new universe.

As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.

The script for 'Trainspotting' was amazing, and it was different from the book.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?

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.

It's a very difficult thing to adapt a piece of existing material into film.

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

As far as books getting turned into movies, I fared very, very well.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.