Ridley Scott Quotes

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

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

I like films to be complete in their written form.

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

I worked in script development, many years ago, and read a lot of scripts. Between that and the scripts I've read as an actor, and I'm a writer as well, I think I have a pretty good sense about whether the bones of a story are there and whether the structure is intact.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.

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.

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.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

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

There was a time when I read a script and I just got excited about the possibilities.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

If I get lucky and I can choose, I would always choose a really good story and screenplay, even if I don't know the director. If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen.

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.