Ralph Fiennes Quotes

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

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

Usually, I think, every film I've made has been a book, and I've always read it.

I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read the book.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

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.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

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 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.

I really enjoy working on adaptations.

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

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.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.