Charlie Brooker Quotes

There are a lot of scripts that you can like, but rarely are there directors attached when you're in development with something and that's stressful.

A film goes through so many hands, that by the time it's done, it might not resemble what you thought you were making.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

It's always the script first choosing roles. [Then] whoever else is attached. I never like to be the first person attached, because I don't really trust what's going on, unless there's a really good director.

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

I don't think writing stops until the film is out. In the edit, it's another draft. [The script] is the food for set, and then the set is food for the edit, and the edit is food for the screen. It's constant, and this is just the first stage of it.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

I have come close to producing films. But generally by the time they hit the screen, there's about 50 people with producer credits, so what's the point. I usually find scripts I like with no money attached and take them to producers that I know and try to raise finance.

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

In many senses, 'Borgen' was a very democratic show. I was always invited to hear the writers' thoughts for the next episodes and allowed to comment on them.

When movies work or a TV series, when they really work, it's because of the collaborative effort. Competition is the death knell for anything, in my opinion. Especially in Hollywood. When actors are competing against each other, or when directors are competing against actors, it's usually the beginning of the end.

The type of producing that I did for many years involved working very closely with directors.

It takes a while to get a movie together, and they don't start talking books until the movie is close to being finished.

My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie.

The day Tarzan opened in London, I sat in a hotel room and discussed the project in detail.

I really want to have actors contribute their own ideas, with phrasings and ideas on all levels.

Over the years with movies, I've given directors notes.

Some of our favorite films are obviously not written by the person who directed it. And yet a 'Taxi Driver,' or some Nicholas Ray movie, like 'In a Lonely Place,' seems so personal or obsessive or whatever.

There is a variety of different kind of producers. I'm a very hands-on, creative producer. I find material that I think would make a good movie or TV show, find the right financier/studio/network, hire a writer, get a good script, find a director, and collaborate with him/her to cast the movie and hire department heads.

It's quite common for a television show to start off as one thing and end up as something completely different. There are so many cooks in the kitchen - the network, the studio.

In film, it is always collaborative, and so to me, it doesn't make sense to not be collaborative in one of its most critical arenas - which is the screenplay.

A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it. And then, there are notes and you change it, in the conventional studio system.

Every animated film that I've worked on - whether it was as a story artist or as Head of Story or even as director - where we originally started out with our story and where we eventually ended up were often very different places.

My solo novel 'Icons' was optioned by Alcon Entertainment, the folks who made the 'Beautiful Creatures' movie, and that's gotten as far as a script, but no news yet.