Sergio Leone Quotes

You sit and you read that, and you have to imagine turning it into a film that people are going to sit and watch. And you have an awful lot of input from a lot of other people. That's the way I work.

The Coen brothers said something that helped me, "When you put the book down, you have a certain feeling, a certain understanding. That's what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That's your job, to literally put this book on film, you won't make a good movie, you'll do no service to anyone.

You usually get a script and you tell people what the story's about, and they have no idea what's going on. Whereas with an adaptation, you come into it, and it seems like everyone you talk to has a million opinions on the cast and the way the story should be told.

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

In 'Blood Work,' they made choices I wouldn't have made, but I'm not a filmmaker. I took the money, and they told the story.

Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.

I see myself as a storyteller. So, when I read something, I see the story, and I see it on screen, in my head, in a certain way. I always want to see it and see me in it.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

Nobody wants to make something that displeases people, but once you make a film, that's out of your control and you can't think about that. You just have to follow your head and make sure that you're satisfied by putting down what you intended.

To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

Very quickly I realized that directing is a combination of things: It's visual, it's directing the actors, it's telling a story. And people don't always mention this part of directing, but it's also knowing how to really edit something into something that makes sense.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

I don't watch a lot of other people's parodies because I don't want to be unduly influenced.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you.

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

We couldn't get it off the ground as a film, but then we begin to think television, and Lowell pushed it out there and Jim and Nick were anxious to do Hap and Leonard anyway, and I had worked with them before, so it was a perfect story. I love the series. I hope there's a second.

People want to join a great story. If you want to lead, tell one with your life.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story.

I wanted to know as the director how the actors wanted to tell this story I wanted to know what they thought.

We want to make sure the stories that show up in Path are both good stories and are a big part of people's lives.

Like most writers, I sit in a room and scribble a story and you don't have a connection with the people who take your story, whether it be to the stage or to the screen.