James Salter Quotes

I'm developing some screenplays at the moment with my Australian producer.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

Every film starts with the script.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

Because I've been at it so long and very steadily, I have a lot of credits, but I probably have twice as many scripts that were never made for whatever reason.

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.

It's really hard to sell a script, and it's even harder to get a movie made. It just almost never happens.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.

I have a pile of scripts at home that I love. Some of them are hard to get made. We have to give up stuff. It's hard to get movies made.

There's no need there to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script, or go round the world raising money.

My closet is full of sad little scripts that didn't get made that have sad endings. It's very hard to get a movie made that has a sad ending.

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

You write a screenplay and then everybody is going to want to get in on it and we have to figure that out. I've written three screenplays that are at studios and I still haven't been making them yet so there is always something that is either going to trip something up or maybe get another pass.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

People kept passing our [ with Robert Ben Garant] script around, and suddenly we had this reputation as screenwriters, which we're not - we're sketch comedy guys.

Tupac Shakur is something that, of course I want to make the Tupac movie, I love Tupac, but when that movie was announced, we didn't even have a script yet. It was just being written. People announce things too soon. If you go to any filmmaker - Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Michael Mann - you go in their offices and there are scripts everywhere and there's about four or five of them you really want to make.

I suppose I can do more for a script as an actor than as a writer - in the film sense.

I can do movies maybe that have already been written, but I can't do anything for months at a time.

It's part of the film-making business and also part of the creative process - putting all the pieces together to make a movie, so that they all line up. Sometimes it looks like you have a lot of projects lined up, but some of them are in different stages.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

I've always just shown up to set and said the lines, [but] I want to help develop scripts and help cast and help bring a visual tone to something.

Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.

A lot of people when they make movies, the actors act like it's their journey and that everyone is on the set to facilitate their journey and the whole thing is set up that way - they ask if you want anything.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.