Anthony McCarten Quotes

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

I want to make movies that I want to see, and what I miss and I'm not seeing.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

The truth is that sometimes art may not exactly reflect one's personal politics, but the story, the drama, the thing you're trying to say, might want to go in a certain direction, and while it may seem like it has resonance with things that are happening topically, you kind of want the world you're creating to have its own internal logic.

I don't want to make movies for kids, and I don't want to make movies for adults either.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

It's incredible to see the creativity, beauty and hardships people capture when filmmaking is opened up and shared with the world.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director.

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

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

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

I don't make films to reproduce reality.