Robert Ben Garant Quotes

What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

The things I have sold to film, I've sold because I was happy to rent out the right to adapt those works. Some things, I haven't sold to film, because I was less interested in having no control over the adaptation.

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

Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don't sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don't have to worry about that.

There's been Hollywood interest in a lot of the stuff that I've done, but 'Descender''s felt different right from the start for whatever reason. I don't know if that's because a lot of my other stuff's a little more idiosyncratic, and 'Descender' has a bit more of a high concept to it.

'Unforgiven' is probably an example of a script that I liked right away but thought, 'This is great, but I'd like to do this when I'm older.' So I stuck it in the drawer for ten years and then took it out.

They sent us the script of 'Back to the Future III' and we wrote 'Doubleback' for it.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

You can have a million dollar, 20 million dollar budget or 60 million dollar budget, and if you don't have a good script, it doesn't mean a thing.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

I had written a script called 'Freed,' which I had wanted to direct.

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

God bless McNally, it's got some fantastic stuff in it, but it's no easy task to make a movie out of.

A lot of my time is spent watching films and reading scripts. And it can be all-consuming. And it's obviously something I'm fortunate that is both my work and my hobby. It's what I would naturally be doing anyway.

I sold my first script when I was 21 - this kids' adventure movie that never got made. I just bought that one back, actually. I'm pretty psyched about it.

I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.

With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

There's one great script that hit my desk that I didn't change at all, and that was True Romance.

'Hardware' came about because I had written quite a few scripts and hadn't had any luck getting them made.

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

I try to picture my books being acted out.

I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.