Watt Key Quotes

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

When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.

A good script makes our job a lot easier.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

I'm just a sucker for a good script.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

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.

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

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.

It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

There's a real art to telling a story in two hours, and that will always be something that people are very, very interested in.

It always comes down to script and characters.

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.

I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

How can you turn down Marks and Gran? Their scripts are so rich in texture.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

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

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.

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.

'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.