Sriram Raghavan Quotes

When you have a performer as talented as Bill Murray or as Harold, that can write as well as they can perform, you can do a final draft on the set if you think of it that way.

The reality about shooting films is that you can shoot many jokes and decide later which one works. So it's not worth fighting about jokes.

I wasn't trained as a writer-director. And the projects I write are difficult to finish.

I allowed the scriptwriter to come to my parties for research and it's a good thing he did otherwise I don't think Personal Services would've been so good.

It was pretty much the way that it was when I first read it, although one exception would be that some ideas that I had were also incorporated into the script.

They're naughty, all those writers - they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on 'The Sopranos': if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

Even if I don't have a job, I work on plays and scenes.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

If you do television, and it's great, it's the best job there is. Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. I love that it's like theater too, and the audience, and it's so short, like twenty minutes... It's like a Haiku or something.

And as I've gotten deeper into the process of making films and television and such, I think I have more trust in the fact that you really never know what you're going to find after the twenty-fifth take.

I did a lot of theater, so especially as an on-camera camera actor, there are so many things that aren't in your toolbox. They're somebody else's job. You think about editors and rhythm. Volume isn't even in your control.

Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work.

Everybody is always trying to make the best movie they can. It's a process.

A film takes a lot of time, and yet not enough to share with the people you're making the movie with, I think.

A movie is a filmed rehearsal in a way. The audience doesn't know that because you're taking out the things that don't work. There's no comparison to the theater because it's live. But making a movie is just as challenging and exciting, I find. A movie is pure process. The theater is the result of process.

I remember working on movies like Gettysburg and feeling that Jeff Daniels was kind of a mentor.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.

The process of doing a play is an organic one, and the process of doing a film is totally inorganic.

I think any filmmaker looks back and thinks, 'Boy, if we only had four hours more on that day when the sun was going down,' or, 'If we only spent more time and went back.'

I have a lot of incomplete short films and incomplete scripts out there.

I like to write scenes in the middle of the night. We could change every word of 'Family Ties' between Monday and Friday.