Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

I think of a book and a play, or a book and a movie, as two separate things - I don't think of it as my novel having a new life.

Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.

I never consciously do any work directly influenced from any movie, unless I'm doing a parody.

I think it's counterproductive for actors to come to the set with well-thumbed copies of the book their film is adapted from.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

What I loved about 'War Dogs' was the fact that the tone - turning that story into a spectacular two hour ride is just such a complicated thing to do.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt a beautiful literary work into a fresh and alive film.

We've seen from shows like 'Game of Thrones' that the book can become a seed, which you plant in the ground of great TV creators, and it can sprout out into a big tree.

When I first heard the 'Urumi' script, I was surprised, shocked, and excited. It was a strong script with a reference to the past. It had fact mixed with fiction. To incorporate facts into a film and introduce fictional characters was interesting. I loved the script.