Ridley Scott Quotes

Movies don't look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody's character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it's creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn't mean I know how to fix them.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.

As hard as you try to write a good script and you have great intentions, this alchemy has to occur.

I'm a big believer that the script is your bible.

There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.

What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.

I haven't thought about getting into production. I'm interested in the creative aspect of storytelling.

I think each book sort of finds its own theme as it goes on. 'Warded Man' was fear. 'Desert Spear' was exploration of the other. 'Daylight War' was relationships. Some of this is intentional, and some of it evolves naturally. The series as a whole is obviously something I have given a lot of thought to, but each book is its own animal as well.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

Mr. Disney and his staff were constantly scouting for great stories to bring to life on film.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

One of the main things I do is focus on ideas and what stories we decide to tell, but probably the biggest part of my job I'd say is working on the storyboards.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.

I want to write a film. I need to think of the right idea and focus on that; I love writing.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done, we don't look at them again, much less relate one to another.

When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.

I went to journalism school, so sometimes writing the script of 'Being Mary Jane' is me putting my journalism hat on.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Each time I make a movie, it's a little bit like taking another course in something because there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

I don't start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It's not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.