Laurence Olivier Quotes

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

Playing Fagin in the play and film was a small miracle.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

Films are always different from books.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

I would love to play Richard III.

Some things that work in a comic don't work in a film, and vice versa.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Antony and Cleopatra' - I'd love to be in that. Or an alternative version of 'Romeo & Juliet' where I get to play Mercutio, something like that.