James Franco Quotes

I have a lot of books optioned. This one sat around for a while - part of that was just because I was trying to figure it out, and I didn't realize I needed Pam to figure it out - but I'm not somebody that likes to option books and then sit on them.

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

I'd love to be involved in the process of adapting a book to a script, but that's simply not my job.

I bought the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I paid to have it made into a play and I played in it for six months. I came back and I tried to make it into a movie, without success.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.

It was exciting to work with director Jennifer Baichwal, who made Manufactured Landscapes and others, on the film of Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. It's called, simply, PAYBACK. Jennifer didn't want to do a transliteration of the book, a kind of illustrated version, but to go into the core of the book: owing and being owed, paying and paying back, on all sorts of levels. So she found real-life, visceral stories that embodied the themes of the book.

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does.

I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.

Adaptation of books is never a success. When the author wants to make it, it's even worse.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

A good adaptation of your book is worth it because it is such a wonderful experience to see your world translated onto the screen.

The most important question for me when I begin working on a film is where to start. For a book, what makes you convinced there is a story that is worthwhile?

Adapting a book is essentially a collaboration, whether the author is alive or dead.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

The challenge was the opportunity. When I read the first draft of Steve Kloves' fabulous adaptation - I hadn't read [Michael] Chabon's book at that time - what I was immediately captivated by was this group of characters that were at once so engaging and so messed up.

When I want to tackle a story or a subject, I always ask myself three questions: Is it important to talk about that? Will it interest other people than just me? Can I live with that for three or four years because that's how long it takes to do the project, to write the script, and to direct it, and then to do this.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.