Dan Futterman Quotes

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

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

And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.

It's great to write for actors when you know who they are. I think I prefer it.

One of the things that I learned in television, and one of the beauties of television, is that, if you have a strong writing staff, they rely on you just as much as you rely on them. They look to me or the other actors to help inspire them to take the character in interesting directions.

When I am writing I don't set a certain number of pages. I do know that the further into a script I get the faster it goes. As soon as you start making decisions you start cutting off all of the other possibilities of things that could happen. So with every decision that you make you are removing a whole bunch of other possibilities of where that story can go or what that character can do. So when I get maybe 2/3's of the way through I can see very clearly where it is going to go.

With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

One thing about writing 'The Sarah Silverman Program' was the concern that I don't give myself the best story, you know what I mean?

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.

I start with characters, and then I start writing, and then, if I'm lucky, things start to happen.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.

By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.

I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.

'Analyze This' is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing. I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense.

When the script is finished, and you're sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you've written, and you're hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.