Travis Knight Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

To adapt a play into a movie, you have to change it.

Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read 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.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

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.

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.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

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

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?

Usually, I think, every film I've made has been a book, and I've always read it.

God bless McNally, it's got some fantastic stuff in it, but it's no easy task to make a movie out of.

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.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

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.