Christopher Darden Quotes

There's a fairy story called the 'The Shoemaker and the Elves' where this old cobbler keeps leaving leather out overnight and wakes up the next day, and there's a new pair of shoes. Co-authoring is a little like that. You send off the manuscript to your partner, and a few days later, you check your email, and hey, there's more book in here!

What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.

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.

I write by myself initially. That's the way I've always written, just working on pure thought by myself. Then I bring it to the table with whoever I'm collaborating with.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Since signing with Universal, I have been working closely with Gary Ross, the director, producer and screenwriter. We have spent many hours on the phone, and I've been sending him information and items that have been useful to the writing process.

I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.

It's good to work with a writer-director.

I rarely write by myself.

The living together is very important in a way. It's important for writing. It wouldn't be important if we were like just getting other people's numbers together, we'd just have to meet at rehearsals, but writing is something almost completely different.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

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.

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.

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.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

I think most co-directors and co-writers just hold hands.

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

Filmmaking is such a collaborative medium.

If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.

That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

Nelson McCormack on 'Killing Kennedy' was really terrific because I wrote the script, and he had some terrific ideas. We went over the script together, and I was with him on set. So it was a collaborative effort.

I see my actors as my collaborators.

My career has gone in such a way that I've gotten to learn that, when you're working with a great storyteller, you don't ask questions; you just trust them.