Brendan I. Koerner Quotes

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.

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 have always thought if you are going to make a film, it's much better to have an original script that will play to film's strengths.

'Rent' was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

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

Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people.

Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.

The truth is, when I started to make films, I was terrified. I had a huge difference in what I was writing in the screenplay and what was on the screen after. Sometimes there was a big gap. Now, the more I have experienced, the more I do movies, the more I feel that the dream is closer to the screen. It's coming with experience.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

Film, for me, has been a process of learning on the job.

For 'So Cold the River,' I'm actually working on adapting the book with Scott Silver, who was just nominated for an Oscar for 'The Fighter,' and who also wrote '8 Mile,' which I think is a terrific screenplay. The chance to work with Scott is a tremendous pleasure and I'm learning a lot.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.

We all write, but the script is a blueprint. We can lose whole scenes when we're shooting.

I love working with young people and young filmmakers, and I love working on first films. I think it's cool. It's fun. I just take it as it comes.

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.

I've never written anything that I haven't wanted to write again. I want to, and still am, writing 'A Few Good Men' again. I didn't know what I was doing then, and I'm still trying to get it right. I would write 'The Social Network' again if they would let me, I'd write 'Moneyball' again. I would write 'The West Wing' again.

Working with directors like Gurinder Chadha was a learning experience for me.

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.

Every inch of my writing career has been influenced by my screenwriting education. I was lucky enough to go to film school at USC, and I got a crash course in how to tell a story efficiently. I learned structure, pace, my style, how to know your audience, and most importantly, how to take criticism and edits properly.

Working with George Miller was an education. It was eight college degrees in character development and directing all at once.

I learned a lot from Direk Brillante Mendoza and Bing Lao.

I experienced a lot of things while I was working with Dibakar Banerjee.