Tracy Letts Quotes

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

This is not a documentary. Are there essential truths that are captured by this movie? I think unquestionably the answer is yes. Do you have to change certain things to make it work? The book is called '13 Hours'; the movie is two hours long.

It's hard enough condensing 500 pages into a movie, and it would have been impossible to condense 800.

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

Whenever you're adapting something that's a 12- or 14-hour read down to something that has to be around two hours, there's going to be some cuts.

All I can say is that I am not one of those writers who want 100% of their book in the film. I recognize that film is a different medium and the filmmaker must have the right to bring some new elements to the table, provided the soul of the book is preserved.

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

People are usually so disappointed with book-to-movie translations.

As an author, it's a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It's tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.

When you read the book, you paint the picture but when you adapt a book then the audience will, by and large, say the book was better and every filmmaker knows this.

If the new movies do contradict my books in some way, I can probably come up with some hand-waving story that will explain the apparent discrepancy. If there’s one thing we authors are good at, it’s hand-waving.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.

We wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' as six hours, and they asked us to make it in four.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.