Mitchell Zuckoff Quotes

You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.

I think it's fair to ask how truthful a film is as opposed to how factual it is.

Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.

To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book.

Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

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.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

It's hard to see a film that's been made from a book that you really loved because it's such a different experience.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

I'm not of the opinion that the next logical step for a book is for it to be made into a film.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.

Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.