Jason Robards Quotes

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.

If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.

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.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Suzanne Collins, it was such a big thing for me to make the handshake with her and to say, 'You can trust me. I will not screw up your books. And I won't let them be diluted and softened. And I won't let them be exploited and made guilty of the sins that are being commented on in the books.' I take that really seriously.

You've got to be honest with yourself aesthetically about who could you play. You want to artistically be true to that character.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

You can't take a play someone has directed and do whatever you want with it.

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've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I think you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your status as an artist to be true to who you are.

I've never adapted a book I didn't love.

Doing interviews about my films really bothers me sometimes, because I have to speak directly and clearly about things I've intended to keep ambiguous, and in a way, I feel like I'm betraying my film.

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 do this movie in a watered-down fashion or have these characters be watered down wouldn't have been near as effective. It wouldn't have been staying true to what this 'Watchmen' phenomenon is.

I didn't look at the previous 'A Wrinkle in Time' movie. I wrote ideas down from the book, but I didn't really want to copy that Meg. We're the same, but we're different at the same time. I wanted to make myself Meg. I didn't want to use somebody else or use a reference.

As an actor, what I can do is tell the truth. At least, I hope I can tell the truth - a dramatic truth, but still an honest portrayal.

I love directing Shakespeare on film. It's fantastic that the actors would do exactly the same thing and be true to their part.

Some writers' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I'd rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.