James L. Brooks Quotes

I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

It's hard writing screenplays.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.

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 feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'

I've never been able to write a movie script. I respect that skill so much, but it's not been the way my brain works.

I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

It certainly made a film writing career for me.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

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.

Personally, I read a lot of scripts.