Nathalie Emmanuel Quotes

You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.

I like talking about comic book process, and one of the things is that I have plans going ahead for years, and the plans constantly get thrown away and shifted. There's a difference between planning and what actually happens in life, and comics have a life of their own.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out — I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.

So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.

It is difficult to change the rules in the middle of a crisis.

True consistency, that of the prudent and wise, is to act in conformity with circumstances, and not to act always the same way under a change of circumstances.

Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

You gotta be able to adapt.

It's possible to change.

In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.

There are times when a film turns out differently from how it was narrated. But I don't look at it as a bad thing.

Whatever you do, whatever you come up with, whatever you decide on, you can go with it, and if the director or the execs, they like it, then you'll stick with it. That's a good thing, as opposed to having something that's already written.

I like to leave things open, and even when I write out the story ahead of time, it always changes. I don't think I would finish anything if I was sticking to a plan that was very rigid.

Everybody has a game plan, but the plan changes after the first punch.

I like change and I like contrast.

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.

All my other movies have the same process. Same approach. Same amount of changes. Everything. Things being made up on the fly. Changing things around. Firing and recasting. Constantly, constantly, in chronological sequence, not really knowing how this is going to end up. That is the only dogmatic approach I take towards everything.

Nothing is written stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered

You never build the perfect building. Only Allah is perfect. Life is such. You make decisions on conclusions, then some guy invents something else and the world changes. That's comforting. There's no one way to use museums, no one way to do art. That also means there is no one way to build museums.

I like food because you can change it. I mean, there is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop; you can make all types of lamb chops. And that's true of everything. And people eat it and it changes and disappears.