James L. Brooks Quotes

I think it's always challenging to look at a script and make it your own while maintaining the sense of what the style of the show is.

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

My job is really to... everyone is reading the script, and my job is to make sure we all interpret it in as much the same way as possible. And then I give them the freedom to sort of - to get their performance across and then make suggestions where things are not working and accentuate and push things where they really are working.

You do a film and you have hopes for it, and you read it, and you see it one way in your head, and you shoot it, and it'll always change from what you started out. Sometimes it turns out better, sometimes it turns out; I don't know, but as movies go I've never experienced seeing and likening what I've read, and I liked what I read.

You're looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.

Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.

The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation.

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

Sometimes you also work with people who don't explain or express to you what they're actually looking for from the shot but you haven't got that problem with this because whatever you're going to do, whether it's good or bad, will get picked up. So, in that way I guess it's pure cinema.

It's very bizarre though when you get hired and then the director will say, "I know how this goes." And you're thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought that I was doing this" but basically what they really want, especially if they wrote it, is they want you to do it as they imagined it. It's virtually impossible.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

There are those who make music and movies in a linear way: They plan them, they have a script. Of course, you have to have a script sometimes, but that alone isn't enough.

I have a lot of trouble with scripts. I have a lot of trouble imagining things while I'm reading them.

Art does not imitate, but interpret.

Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God's way is.

Because things like this you can only ssay once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

I think you have to be true to the script that you're given.

The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.

Without being good enough, I started figuring out how to make my way through the minefield of a script, which is what it was to me at the time, and the rest is semi-history.

At times as an actor, it's often times unclear as to what the directors envision for a project.