Arthur Miller Quotes

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.

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

I don't make movies. I don't feel that I have to have artistic control. Part of this comes from the fact that the book lives on no matter what Hollywood does to your novel in terms of a film. Now, you try to be careful who you allow to do your film because nobody wants their novel to become a turkey movie. But, on the other hand, it is a crapshot anyway, because even the best people can make a bad film.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

There are so many scripts and they are fantastic. I think I would like to do something different, maybe something smaller.

With Legion, we're our own universe. It gives Noah [Hawley] the freedom to do what he wants to do. Because we play with so many different timelines, and we rebooted and not really rebooted and all that, we felt like, OK, we're going to throw it out there and hope the fans accept it.

I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.

I love making the backstory for myself. I think it's important. Every part I play, I work on the backstory. If it's fully written out in the script, or there are intimations of it in the script, fine. If not, fine, no problem. I'll fill it in, or I'll create what it is.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

If you're gonna tell a story from beginning to end, I always think you have to have a great structure in a script. If it gets you excited and it's something you've never read before that's another plus. I think also with improv and that whole world of stand-up, that's a whole other organism of comedy that still needs a story, but it's more free-form. On the set, it is the combination of both those worlds coming together: a great script and an allowance to play with it.

I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

I think a lot of ["Cosmopolitans"] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.

I don't think about music as being new or modern. I just play.

I never wanted to do Harry Potter. I thought it should have stayed as a book. There are some books that should be made into movies and some that shouldn't. Harry Potter is 70% imagination. When the movie comes out, it's going to be such a stereotype for kids. When they think of Harry Potter, they're going to think of what is portrayed on screen.

The last thing I want to do is having someone get behind a Montgomery Clift biopic, and then just do the first script that came out. Sometimes it takes a long time for these things to gestate. And I'm only going to do it if it's the right story that's told for the right reason, and that's relevant to this day and age, as much as it pays homage to who this man was. Should that happen during the time when I'm still young enough to play him, perfect. And if not, hopefully someone else will get to play him because I do think it's an incredible story.

I think screenwriter Steve Kloves does such a difficult job. And he does a bloody brilliant job, too. Transferring these Harry Potter books into films and making them coherent is one thing. But making them entertaining, as well, is quite another... He does a tremendous job, and he gets a lot of stick. And it's really unfair sometimes, and I challenge anyone else to do the job he does.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

There's a lot of guys up there who like wearing a suit or try doing jokes that they think will play to a certain crowd, or maybe get them corporate work. I've always written jokes that I would want to hear. So, I'm trying to entertain myself more than anything.

I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.

I was part of the sort of avant guard tradition of John Cage and music concrete and pushing back the boundaries of avant garde classic pop rhythms. I think everyone brings something completely different to it.