Kathleen Kennedy Quotes

Every script always goes through rewrites so that everyone loves it.

I always get quite close to my script because I work quite hard on them.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

My experience is that's rare - that you have a script that is... what they call 'film-ready.'

It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying 'I don't really love this,' we discuss it for 15 minutes.

You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don't accept, 'Oh, I did a draft and...' No, it's your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better.

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.

It often takes a couple of years to get a script right and then takes a couple of years to get financing together.

I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.

I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.

I'd love to work on a script in collaboration.

After 'Divergent,' I got a job rewriting a sci-fi script at Paramount. I think they really liked what I did, so I got a call saying, 'We're about to shoot 'Ninja Turtles' in three or four months; do you wanna come in and do a little work on the script?' That was the beginning of a many-month 'Ninja Turtle' odyssey.

Typically, I work with the script and the director for awhile before, just to make sure we're on the same page.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

It doesn't help anybody to put out a bad script.

I was hired to do this one great script called 'Cap'n Ricky' and that project is up in the air at the moment.

In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.

It's really interesting with scripts, because you never really know. It's paper and it could be great or awful. Even scripts that are good could end up not working.

I don't believe in development. I believe in pre-pre-production, so when I sit down with an idea for a movie, I'm thinking I'm going to make this film. I don't think about anything else.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

Good scripts have always been, I think, hard to find. Good storytelling, good writing - it's just not easy. I have made it a point that - if I'm going to put the energy into doing this work - I will wait until I find something I'm really happy with.

I have never seen a script that hasn't gone through at least eight different iterations before they even begin filming, and frequently what is filmed is not what's in the script, because things change on the ground. An actor can't say a particular line. An actor will have a brainstorm and ad lib something utterly brilliant.

When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.