Jonathan Tropper Quotes

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

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

'Just' writing is every bit as important as any other creative part of a film.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.

There are no great scripts - just great films.

So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

The reason most novelists are not good screenwriters is that you don't have time for a lot of details. Novelists can really create a richer experience for the reader and have many subplots. You only have 90 pages because each page is a minute of screentime. You have to have certain things happen by certain pages, a certain story arc in the movie.

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.

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.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.

People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.

As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I'm curious to see how it translates.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

I like to be involved with the scriptwriter early on, helping shape the story, and working out how the story can be told directorially.

I've done a lot of ad films where an idea can be translated in 30 or 40 seconds. But in a movie, an idea needs to be stretched for two hours, and requires you to draw a bit from your experiences in life.