Robert Schwentke Quotes

The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.

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

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film... at least in Hollywood studio films.

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.

Filmmaking, whatever the window dressing or the scale of a film may be, is eventually about telling a story.

All great cinema has the sense of the dynamic, the transitional, mixed with the mythical and the sense of ritual.

I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it's kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

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 like films to be complete in their written form.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.

I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.

Cinema is an infinite medium, so we should take advantage of it, I think.

Ultimately, a director is a storyteller. I wanted to fortify that part of my life as a director, so I thought the best way to do that is to study and learn about the greatest stories ever written.

I've always had an interest in story-telling and history and just film and art in general, but particularly when it comes to storytelling, I think the reason why we became involved in film is because we wanted to get some great stories out there.

A great director is someone who makes you feel like you're moving forward.