Joseph Fiennes Quotes

The script is just a blueprint.

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.

David Mamet, Tim Kazurinsky, and Denise DeClue, who adapted [ About Last Night]. Between the three of them... I mean, it's always down to the writing. You're only as good as your writing.

Anytime you take a book and make it into a movie, you're going to have people who have their version of it in their minds and whatnot. You can't please everybody.

I think what's fun about the fairytales is just seeing what everybody interprets them as, which comes from the different directors and what they want to do with them.

I think artists are going to express things from an emotional point of view, that's their job, to suggest and interpret, and report what they witness. That's their job as artists, you're looking for the rub, where's the rub, you're a storyteller, you're looking for the rub, not necessarily the solutions, or you're not necessarily educated, you're not the winner of a debate contest, a national debate contest, you're not necessarily a person who has a doctorate in anything.

An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.

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.

I've watched 'Ringu' probably three or four times before writing the first draft of 'The Ring.' And then I'd seen 'Ringu 2' I think once.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

A book is one kind of an art form and a film is a different art form. I think as a writer you just have to say, well the book is one thing, and the film is a completely different one.

You know how when you read a book and it becomes a movie, and it's different than you pictured? In some ways, acting is a lot like that.

Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.

I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.

The great thing about Satan is it's kind of like Hamlet. Everyone puts their own signature on it in a way, whether it's Al Pacino or little old me.

The fun of superhero comics is finding ways to turn the pieces that you know so that they're suddenly about things that you want them to be about, as long as they're true to the core and true to the DNA of the mythology.

Story is the primary factor any day. If I believe that a particular director would do justice to it, I will accept an offer.

You know, things that might work in a book just do not work in the visual medium of movies.

As an actor, you buy into someone else's dream and make it your own, and you don't lose sight of that.

Sometimes, I think filmmakers grab too much from real life.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

Acting - you're taking someone else's visions and someone else's inspirations, and it's up to you to portray that to everyone watching the film.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means.

In voicing so much is left to your imagination to create the world around you like that. It's really the essence of what's so fun for, I think, many people when they first start to want to be an actor, is that they realise they enjoy making up a world around them to exist in, a whole situation and a whole way of being. And even more so than theatre, animation requires that because there's just nothing to go on. It's in your head and your heart or it's not there at all.