Tom Stoppard Quotes

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation. In this play, I had a strong main character and it involved some creation around him. That's what I like about adapting that particular play because I added some maneuvering space as a scriptwriter to invent my own things.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

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.

I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.

You want to have the experience. As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. You got on a film sometimes and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not. We're good at saying what other people have written, but for the majority of it, that's about it, comedians aside. It's all in the writing. Whether that's dialogue or character, or whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as they've done something special, than you can do something special.

I love working on scripts. I love coming up with ideas about what people would dress like or talk like. I love all that.

For the collection, I am like a painter or a writer. I may or may not be a character in my own story.

I like to have a much greater base and know a lot more about my character before I begin to fill the person. So a lot of it really entails sit-downs with them, determining who she is, where she came from, and why she reacts a certain way, and then I was really able to expand upon a lot of that and create a lot of that story on my own.

The challenge was the opportunity. When I read the first draft of Steve Kloves' fabulous adaptation - I hadn't read [Michael] Chabon's book at that time - what I was immediately captivated by was this group of characters that were at once so engaging and so messed up.

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

You're trying to bring a character to an audience, and tell stories. That's what we're all trying do.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...

Every film starts with the script.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

I structure the scripts and work on them on films and work on scenes with writers and but I haven't written a script myself, I really respect what they do and I'm fortunate I get to work with people that I really enjoy working with and we all kind of spitball and work together on these things, but I haven't written a script yet.

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.