Ronald Harwood Quotes

The director in TV and the writer and the creator are working very much hand in hand.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

I love Malcolm Lee and jumped on the opportunity to work with him as a director.

Working on 'Drive', a lot of fun. This is Tim Minear whom I've worked with before on 'Firefly' of course. He called me up and said, 'I've got a part for you that you will love,' and I love Tim's writing. I love his stories. I love his characters, his dialogue. He has a knack for reveals and he has a knack for moments.

And 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll' was a very transitional film for me in that I was one of the producers and you know, came up with the idea with the writer and the producer, as well. But, it was a very collaborative event. You know, I really love working in that way.

I'm proud of 'Sinister' because Scott and Cargill did a great job on the movie, and I set up a framework for them to make what they wanted to make. They gave me the idea, and I figured out how to get it out into the world.

Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it's really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.

The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.

I read an interview with Mark Wahlberg, and he was like, 'I might read a script and love it, but it's all about the filmmaker.' I think that's a good lesson for me.

Steven and I have worked together a lot and I'm far ahead of the curve than most people in knowing what he wants, but he knows far more than I know about what's important for the story. So, most of the changes he will make will involve story changes.

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

People offer me loads of stuff, and some of it I like, but I just can't do it because I can't write it all. So I might get in the position where I have some sort of company and just write maybe the first episode, but these are love projects, in a way.

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.

Directing is a very long process, and I have to be in love with it if I want to give up two years of my life and live with it from beginning to end!

I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.

I'm an actor first and foremost. My producing credentials are just to say, 'Yeah, I love this story and now let's bring the people, the ensemble together,' and I get out of the way. I have no desire to check on schedules and shooting schedules and money and stuff like that.

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

I love working with male actors, and I think there's a tendency to write really interesting characters that would work solely alongside men where they would be in a man's world and have to deal with that, and it creates a lot of interesting storylines. For me, it's kind of circumstantial, but I definitely enjoy it.

It was actually Peter's idea that I should make the film. He called me in the very beginning, and I hadn't even read the book. So I read it and I liked it very much and I knew I'd certainly like to do it.