Gary Oldman Quotes

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?'

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision.

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.

The biggest difference in writing a sequel is that now there are expectations. But also - and this is the awesome part - now there are fans, too!

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

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?

I have never been one of those actors who say, 'Oh, my character wouldn't do this,' or 'My character never wears an orange shirt,' or any of the number of inane things I've heard on movie sets throughout my career.

I think when you're a fan of a book you do have your own little version of the characters and I hope that some people feel we are the versions they might have imagined.

Remakes are tricky and I wanted to approach 'Nerkonda Paarvai' as a fresh film. Taapsee and I are different people. Naturally, our understanding of characters won't be the same. Further, I didn't want to be influenced by her performance and I like it that way.

If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.

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.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.

I'd always envied actors who got to play real people or got to do research. I've always just had these scripts where, I mean not in a bad way, but it was right on the page.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

I actually want to do a theatrical adaptation of 'Hateful Eight' because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

When you read a play, the words speak to you. When you read a script, there's no way you can tell if that's the way that movie will turn out.

I see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

As an actor, when you want to capture the spirit of the character, and the character exists in all of the iterations slightly differently, you work towards getting a sense of what the creators wanted to do, you know? Then, you work off of that.

With 'Battlestar Galactica,' we had such resistance from the fan base to changing it. The upshot was, we ultimately won them over.