Stan Lee Quotes

I'd always intended to make 'Far North' straight after 'The Warrior.' We had the rights to the short story, the script was in development, and I knew where I wanted to shoot it. It just took a long time getting the script together and raising the finance.

It often takes a couple of years to get a script right and then takes a couple of years to get financing together.

I was hired to do this one great script called 'Cap'n Ricky' and that project is up in the air at the moment.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.

It's very, very rare in this business [moviemaking] where a script lands on your lap ready to go.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

I worked with John Maybury on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary film-maker. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it.

It's a debilitating process, working with the studios. With the length of time it takes for drafts and development deals, your enthusiasm is gone before you're ready to make the film.

You know, if the filmmakers were satisfied with the film they just made, they could jump right in and make another one, instead of lingering on the last one.

It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying 'I don't really love this,' we discuss it for 15 minutes.

It's fairly common to get something optioned but really rare to actually see it become a movie.

The best thing about being a film producer is I get to spend 99 per cent of my time behind the scenes.

When you're pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don't know the dimensions of it.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

In Hollywood, they create banks of scripts, whether they are used or not.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.

Actors don't request what scenes to be written in. That's just not how it works.

I take time with my films and I want to work on every script properly before I move on to something else.

Well, this movie I've been working on for a while. I had the idea for the movie like twenty years ago when I was doing 'Empire of the Sun' in 1987 because at that time that's when all these Vietnam movies were being made and my friends and I were going on auditions for these Vietnam movies and my friends were getting them and going away to fake boot camps.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

I'm a big fan of the Pixar movies, and Ed Catmull, who wrote a book about his experiences producing them, talks about how it takes three or four years to get it right.

I've been acting for many years now, and I find there's nothing I enjoy more than making films with my friends and people I like, who also are the funniest people around.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.