Essie Davis Quotes

I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.

I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.

The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

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.

A movie is a movie and a book is a book, and they have different rules.

What makes a good book and what makes a good movie are totally different things.

I couldn't enjoy 'A Dance With Dragons,' unfortunately. Of course, I enjoyed it, but it was the first of the books I read as a writer on 'Game of Thrones,' so all I could do is think, 'We're going to have to shift that,' 'We won't be able to afford that,' or 'That's a great scene.'

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.

If a film isn't really talking about who we are and what our psychologies are, then we're probably not that interested in it, actually.

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

As a novelist, you have to realise that the novel and the film have to live separate lives. They're just different, like your kids, even if they look alike.

The script for 'Trainspotting' was amazing, and it was different from the book.

My agent will say, 'Well, it's another graphic novel.' I don't care. It's better writing than anything else that's out there. The characters are much better.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

It's kind of a test when you read a novel thinking about its potential for the screen: How does it play on your mind's screen?

To tell you the truth, while I do enjoy the grand-scale elements, it's the personal scenes, the character moments that I really find satisfying. That's where I get to delve into the characters' minds and hearts. That's where they become living, breathing beings to me.

In 'Sanju,' there are too many colours. Some other filmmaker could have taken a dark side to that story.

The films that have influenced me most are: 'The Hustler', 'Badlands', 'Hud', 'Tender Mercies', 'Cool Hand Luke', 'A Perfect World', and 'Laurence of Arabia'. I also really like 'Fletch'. I feel like all of these films reached an honest place in regard to the human condition while also stringing together really entertaining stories.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.