Bryan Lee O'Malley Quotes

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

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.

There's got to be something that you can do that will not just be a nice honor to the play, or the book, or the movie you're dealing with, but some aspect that maybe can explore something that the play couldn't do.

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?'

As a songwriter you have an umbilical cord to the song and it's hard to expand on your understanding of the lyrics. Whereas when you cover a song you can create your own reason why you're attached to it.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

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 haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

In any adaptation, the challenge is to take the essence of the original source of the material, be faithful to it to a point, but to also recognize that you're telling a story in a very different medium. It has to exist on its own, and it has to offer something unique to that experience.

I didn't look at the previous 'A Wrinkle in Time' movie. I wrote ideas down from the book, but I didn't really want to copy that Meg. We're the same, but we're different at the same time. I wanted to make myself Meg. I didn't want to use somebody else or use a reference.

The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you.

You're not doing the scene exactly the way it is in the book [The Hunger Games], but the intention of the scene is there.

I don't like to use the word 'remake', I think reinterpretation is a better word. It's just a matter of respecting the source, and then trying to make your own film, and trying not to be inhibited by being so beholden to every single thing... We respect the source, but we make changes to it.

Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.

Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

Do the things that make perfect sense to you, [and] don't be afraid to shout it from the mountain tops just because it's outside the box or against the grain in your industry. More often than not, you're probably going to be right.