Brendan Sexton III Quotes

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.

Over the years, I have been approached about making Ramona into a cartoon or movie, but I was afraid that no one could really capture the spunky character of Ramona.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

When I do a film, usually I work from my director. That's my boss. The director is interpreting the writer's vision, and we all interpret it, and they create their own vision as well.

Some stories seem to lend themselves to telling right away. 'All The President's Men' was done, what, four or five years after the event? It certainly seemed to work there, as opposed to something that happened 40 years ago.

I really liked 'Premam,' and when we decided to remake it, our intention was never to make a better film.

Critics have never been able to discover a unifying theme in my films. For thatmatter, neither have I.

A movie's very different from the book, and it's different from the script, and it's usually one person's vision.

Because [writers] Dan Weiss and David Benioff have done such a great job in adapting them, that's what we work with. It serves no purpose to anybody for actors to come onto a set with a well-thumbed copy of the source material and start querying why this or that line has been left out of the script. It's probably been left out for a good reason.

I just believe in the movie. I don't care what the book was like. I don't care what the previous film was like or other films were like. I care only about the script I've got.

I always try to stay objective, and to remove myself from the process and look at the film again.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

We couldn't get it off the ground as a film, but then we begin to think television, and Lowell pushed it out there and Jim and Nick were anxious to do Hap and Leonard anyway, and I had worked with them before, so it was a perfect story. I love the series. I hope there's a second.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

The Coen brothers said something that helped me, "When you put the book down, you have a certain feeling, a certain understanding. That's what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That's your job, to literally put this book on film, you won't make a good movie, you'll do no service to anyone.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Literally, the piece at the end is where the universe is cracked apart, it's a big moment. Basically, they, the filmmakers, have directed the story earlier in the book. It happens, it's called adapting a book, you have to make decisions about things. It's not unusual having to cut out scenes.

Compromise is part and parcel of making a movie. It's a question of the kinds of compromises that you have to make.

Once I'm in the editing room, forget about what I intended to shoot. I take a cold, hard look at what I really did shoot, and then I edit that because, if you try to edit what you intended and you missed somewhere, that will show up.

When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day.

Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.

First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture.

I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn't even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman's take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.

In urging all writers to be steadfast in reliance on the ultimate victory of excellence, we should no less strenuously urge upon them to beware of the intemperate arrogance which attributes failure to a degraded condition of the public mind. The instinct which leads the world to worship success is not dangerous. The book which succeeds accomplishes its aim. The book which fails may have many excellencies, but they must have been misdirected.

If I were doing somebody else's script or I adapted a book by Philip Roth, on set there could be a million different interpretations of the material and people could argue with me. Certainly on Synecdoche, New York we had discussions and arguments, but I felt like I had authority because I'm a writer.